is it better to speak or to die?

My 5th journal "Is It Better to Speak or to Die" is the first time I'm letting every guarded thing out of my chest at once. For years I swallowed storms, smiled with blood in my mouth, and called it manners. I let love cut me open and then hid the wound because "too much" felt safer than the truth. These pages are where I finally stopped. Every poem in here is a shard I refused to swallow again. They're messy, loud, bleeding, sometimes ugly, always mine, and they all answer the same question I've carried since I was sixteen: when the truth could ruin everything, do you still speak, or do you die quietly?

I chose to speak.
This book is what that choice looks like when it's no longer polite.