Brie Nicole Inked

I stopped folding it. Stopped pressing my pain into something quiet, something digestible. It comes out now. Uneven, shaking, loud in the wrong places. I cry mid-sentence. I laugh through tears that haven’t finished falling. I say ‘I’m not okay’ and don’t rush to fix it after. healing is not soft hands and clean lines. It is rupture. It is reopening. It is my voice cracking like bone and still choosing to speak. I am not a closed wound. I am a mouth. I am telling it. all of it. even the parts that make people look away.

I say it again when they flinch. I say it when the room goes too still. I say it when I feel myself reaching for silence out of habit. No. Stay. Let it sit between us, raw and breathing. Let it be inconvenient. Let it be unfinished. I am learning that healing is not a performance of progress. It is repetition. Circling the same ache. Naming it again. Letting it echo until it softens, even slightly.

There is something brutal about being seen mid-repair, about letting people witness the fracture instead of the finished scar. But I am done waiting to become something polished before I exist out loud. This, this trembling, uneven becoming, is allowed to take up space. I am allowed to be heard before I am whole.