I. The Rupture
When lead tore through bone and breath, the languages I spoke shattered into glass. I drifted into the deep dark, fluent and whole, and awoke to a room of absolute silence, imploring my tongue to remember its native soil.
A uniform sowed a spark inside my skull; now, the lightning strikes without warning, convulsing the ground beneath me— a tempest born from a badge. The sapphire flare of a siren does not merely light the cobblestones; it pierces the dark of my mind, igniting a fuse of ancient electricity.
Every dawn demands a fragile truce with my own skin. I cradle my morning tea with both hands, shielding the porcelain from the sudden, internal earthquake that slumbers within my nerves.
II. The Awakening
I woke up stripped bare, vulnerable, naked under the glaring blue, as hands reached out to drape cloth over my shivering frame.
They placed me on a chair, a fragile island in a sea of unfamiliar faces, surrounded by a circle of murmuring ghosts.
Among the crowd, my eyes anchored on one man— a single, solitary face my mind managed to claim from the dark. Beside him stood a woman they called my sister. I looked at her, and felt nothing but the cold expanse of absence; I did not know her, could not trace her lineaments in the fog of my ruined mind.
It was only later, frozen within the borders of a photograph, that her identity was handed back to me— a piece of paper teaching my heart who it belonged to, long after the bullet had erased the recognition from my eyes.
III. The Split Mirror
Before the iron storm, I was a map of open roads. My voice was a river flowing through many lands, speaking in the cadences of different tongues, effortless, untamed, and certain of tomorrow.
I walked through the world with light steps, never knowing the weight of my own heartbeat, never imagining that safety could be a privilege stolen in a flash of light.
Now, I am a fortress built from the rubble.
The polyglot is gone, replaced by a seeker who must mine the silence for a single, stubborn noun.
My body is no longer a quiet vessel; it is a landscape shaped by seismic faults, where every step requires a soldier’s vigilance, and every morning is a victory won against the dark.
IV. The Frozen Ledger
Across the city, thirteen winters have settled upon the ledger of a sleeping courthouse, while my flesh learned to navigate a world it scarcely recognized.
To the magistrates, I am a number fading on a dusty spine. They remain blind to the truth: that every year they delay, is a year my soul spends wandering the ruins, searching for its stolen words.
They sought to bury me in a syntax I no longer possess, yet they failed.
The old self was a book written in golden ink; the new self is an epic carved into stone.
They broke the vessel, yes, but they could not spill the spirit.
I look at the ghost of who I was, not with pity, but with reverence— and out of the ashes of their violence, I am forging a new dialect, written in the language of survival.
