Her Silence Is Not My Shame

Her silence is not my shame.
Though she cloaked herself
in reticence and ritual,
folded her truths into corners
and called them memory—
I will not wear that hush
like inheritance.

She,
mistress of omission,
built her fortress
from unspoken confessions,
from careful curation of narrative
and neglect.
She carved a lineage
in quietude—
but I will not perpetuate
the tyranny of restraint.

There are names
she refused to speak.
Wounds she embalmed
with pretence,
wrapping them in civility
and perfumed lies.
But sterilized pain
is still pain.
Muted violence
is still violence.
And I will not cradle
what she concealed
as if it were sacred.

The weight of her discretion
was never mine to carry.
The etiquette of suppression
dismantled me
in polite, palatable increments.
But I am not an altar
for her denial.
I am not a reliquary
for generational decorum.

I am rupture.
I am reckoning.
I am the mouth
she never opened.

And though they tell me
it is unbecoming
to articulate the ruin—
I will not bow
before the cult
of her composure.

I will name it.
All of it.
The abuses entombed
beneath tablecloth pleasantries.
The hollowness
in her withheld embrace.
The complicity
in her curated silences.

Let them flinch.
Let them gasp
at my audacity
to speak the bones
she buried in velvet.

Because the absence of her voice
is not a void I need to fill—
it is a symptom
of her surrender.

And I?
I have chosen combustion.
I have chosen breath.
I have chosen
to extricate myself
from the mausoleum
of her refusal.

Her silence
may have defined the past.
But it will not dictate the future.
It is not my shame.
It never was.

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