They told me silence meant survival
so I swallowed truth like rusted nails.
Each word I didn’t say
built a cage inside my chest.

I bore the weight of unspoken truth
the silence I was handed,
the silence I held as gospel.
It crushed me, bruised me,
then numbed me into stillness.
I learned to live with it.
I learned to play along.

It dressed itself in calm replies,
in nods and smiles that weren’t mine.
It learned to speak in careful lies
and I became its favorite shrine.

I forgot the shape of anger.
My voice once sharp grew dull with dust.
I watched my thoughts turn into whispers,
then into echoes,
then into nothing.

I stopped calling it silence.
It became the air I breathed,
the pause between my footsteps,
the reason I couldn’t cry.

I became fluent in vanishing.
Not all at once
just in pieces.

First, my opinions curled inward.
Then, my wants dissolved like mist.
Eventually, even pain forgot my name.

I didn’t say “I’m fine.”
I became fine
the kind that doesn’t mean anything.
A word repeated until it loses shape.
A smile worn down to muscle memory.

And somewhere beneath my ribs,
something small curled up and went still.
Not dead.
Just waiting
for permission.

It didn’t wound me
it buried me.

Not beneath dirt,
but beneath days I didn’t speak,
moments I didn’t fight,
feelings I didn’t name.

It hollowed me with gentleness,
like water carving stone.
No screaming.
No final act.
Just a slow unmaking.

And so I died
in a room full of people,
with my smile still stitched in place.

No one mourned
because no one noticed.
They just said I’d grown quiet.
That I’d become so calm.

But calm was the coffin.
And silence
my forever echo.