Expressing_Inink
There was a little girl.
She didn't talk much. People called her "quiet".
But inside her head, there were a thousand conversations happening at once.
She was too little to understand anything.
The loud voices. The silences. The way people looked at each other.
She didn't know what any of it meant.
All she knew was that she was too small, and the world felt too big.
But as she grew, she started to understand everything.
Too much, too soon.
Still, she couldn't express it.
She became a champion at hiding.
Since she was little, she learned to smile when it hurt.
To nod when she was confused.
To keep everything inside because that felt safer.
So she started pouring it all onto pieces of paper.
The untold things.
The things from her childhood she never said out loud.
The fears. The dreams. The overthoughts that never slept.
At night, things got worse.
Sometimes her body wouldn't move. Her chest felt heavy.
And in the dark, all the things she buried came back to visit.
Sleep paralysis, she later learned it was called.
But to her, it just felt like the world was finally listening to her secrets.
That paper became her voice.
Because when words failed her, ink didn't.
So she did the only thing she could.
She wrote.