A sharp crack-glass shatters against the cold floor. My breath catches in my throat. I'm trembling, heart pounding like a trapped animal. It was Mom's coffee mug - the one she's always guarded like a treasure. I crouch, hands shaking, to pick up the jagged pieces. Blood blossoms on my palm, but I barely notice the sting.
My mind screams, What now? What storm is this shattering about to unleash?
Then I see her- standing in the doorway, eyes cold, lifeless. Like a predator sizing her prey.
Before I can blink, she yanks me up by my hair, dragging me into the suffocating silence of my room.
Her hands crash down, shattering my ballet music box the only thing left from a dream that's been dying since before I was born. The sound of splintering wood and tinkling glass fills the room, and with it, a silence heavier than any scream.
"You see how I feel now?" Her voice is low, venomous. Calm, but shattering.
I swallow down the hot tears burning my throat. That music box wasn't just a box. It was me.
My passion. My secret hope in a house full of ghosts and broken promises.
And now, it's dust..
I scribble my rage onto a page the only way I can bleed without being torn apart. Words spi like fire, burning the paper with every furious stroke. Then I tear the page, fling it away - not into the safety of my own trash, but across the fence into the neighbor's yard.
I don't know their name. I don't care. They never complain. Maybe they understand broken souls.
Days pass. The page disappears. The cycle repeats.
My pain, folded and thrown into the next yard because I had no one else, and I couldn't keep it inside. I wrote my rage, my humiliation, my suffocation, and tossed it away like trash - hoping the world would find it and recognize it as a soul still trying to speak.
I didn't even know who lived at 18 Rue des Lias. And they never complained. Never came to the door. Never knocked on my window.
So I kept doing it. Every time the pressure in my chest became unbearable, I wrote. I tore it out of me, like removing a rotten organ, and threw it into their yard like a curse.
And then one day he was there.
I was walking home from school, dragging my limbs like a corpse, and I saw him. Standing in
front of the house.
He looked my way and smiled.
My whole body stopped.
"You're quite something," he said. "You keep dirtying my yard with those letters. Every day. Like clockwork. I can't decide if you hate me, or if you're just trying to get my attention."
I froze. My throat burned. My eyes started stinging from somewhere deep inside.
"I... I'm sorry. You won't get them anymore.
He laughed not cruelly. Softly. With curiosity. "Don't stress it. I'm joking. Perhaps you could tell me yourself, with that little mouth of yours, instead of it down."
My heart stopped. He noticed my mouth. My mouth.
And then I saw her.
My mother.
Standing by the window. Watching.
I panicked. I ran. I ran. Back into the house. Slammed the door. That night, I was punished. I wasn't allowed to speak to boys. Hell, I wasn't allowed to speak at all unless spoken to.
She hit me harder that night. She broke a wooden spoon against my back.
But I didn't cry. Not because I wasn't in pain. But because something inside me had changed. He spoke to me. He smiled. He knew my words. He acknowledged me? ME?- wild, strange, unknown.
And that was the moment. That was when I knew.
If I can't have a mother, if I can't have a father, if I can't even have a name - Let me belong to him. Even if he doesn't want me. Even if he forgets me.
Let me burn for him in silence.