WHAT YOU'LL PROBABLY NEVER KNOW

There’s a truth that lived in my throat like a locked, unlit room,and you walked past it daily, never sensing the quiet bloomof a story too jagged to carry in open air,a truth I swallowed whole because speaking it felt like tearing open a prayer. 1.0The truth I kept quiet because saying it felt too heavy to hold:a friend’s hands almost stealing what was mine, bold as cold,fear crawling up my spine like a shadow that knew my name,teaching me how familiar faces can redesign their shape to flame.What I meant to tell you pulses underneath this line,a heartbeat I hid so it wouldn’t echo out of time. 2.0They’ll never know because I grew tired of being the explainer-of-me,tired of proving why books feel safer than people ever could be,why poets like Huwa and Celia and Ally sound like home in my chest,why ice cream tasted like a soft place to restwhen the world felt sharp and unforgiving below.What I wanted to tell someone drifts quietly through this flow. 3.0The parts of me they only ever saw in scattered light:the childish spark they dimmed, the sadness they said wasn’t right,the attentiveness they doubted, the softness they threw away,the readiness to care that they mocked into decay.Every time I tried to show myself, they told me not to show,and what I couldn’t say in the moment stitched itself into this woe. 4.0The one thing I almost told them, but silence became my shield:how my aunt’s anger struck harder than anything I could wield,how mop sticks and belts wrote stories on my skin,how hangers flew like warnings, demanding I break or bend again,how my voice shrank small in that unforgiving undertow.What stayed stuck in my throat burns slow in this shadowed glow. 5.0The grief and tenderness no one imagined lived inside my frame:how boys online twisted guilt till I almost believed I was to blame,how manipulation dressed itself as affection and pulled me apart,how apologies spilled from me for wounds carved into my heart.Through it all I smiled, a cracked mask no one thought to outgrow,a brightness too fragile, a truth too deep to show. And there was the ache I never admitted even to myself:the way being the middle child made love feel like a shelftoo high for my hands, a place I kept reaching for in vain,how every birthday, every silence, stitched its own quiet stain.I mistook being overlooked for being unworthy of being known,and what I couldn’t see in the moment was how deeply that had grown. These are the things I tried to say,the words I never got out,the quiet things with sharp edges,stories I never said out loud,what you’ll probably never know.These are... THE UNSPOKEN VERSIONS OF ME From: The 'Unspoken Versions Of Me' series Final part

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