Under My Tongue

There are words we hold under the tongue. Not forgotten - kept. Pressed down and carried, sometimes for years, until they change shape and become heavier than what they started as. A sentence you stopped halfway. An apology you rehearsed and never gave. A "no" that came out as "it's fine." A grief nobody asked about, so you learned to hold it politely, the way you'd hold a coat for someone who never came back for it.

This is where I let them out.

These are poems and short texts about pending emotions - the ones that were never delivered. About the things I endured for years and told no one, not because they weren't real, but because saying them out loud felt more dangerous than carrying them. Silence can be a kind of safety. It's also a kind of debt, and eventually it comes due.

I'm not writing this to be healed in public, and I'm not writing it for anyone's sympathy. I'm writing because some things deserve to exist outside my body. Because a feeling that has never been named keeps living in the dark, and naming it - even badly, even years late - takes some of its power back.

You'll find soft things here and you'll find sharp ones. Love that went unanswered. People I still speak to in my head. The version of me who stayed quiet, and the one learning not to. Some pieces are addressed to someone specific. Some are addressed to no one. Some are just the truth, set down plainly, because it was time.

If you recognize yourself in any of it - if you also have words sitting under your tongue, waiting - then you were never as alone in it as it felt. That's the whole reason this exists.

Take your time here. Nothing on this page is in a hurry. It waited years already.