Emptiness in the Voice

They say the eyes never lie

but mine have learned silence better than truth.

They hold stories that never made it to words,

that tremble behind a practiced smile.

When you look close enough

you’ll see it

the hollow.

The place where laughter once lived

before it was stolen.

I speak,

but my voice is dust.

It cracks between syllables,

searching for something solid to stand on.

Each word tastes like iron and memory.

Each breath a negotiation

between breaking and surviving.

They call it SGBV,

as if letters could carry the weight

of what it means to lose your sense of safety,

your own body becoming a battlefield

you never enlisted to fight in.

Sometimes I want to scream.

But when I open my mouth,

only silence comes out

a silence so heavy it drowns sound itself.

That’s the emptiness in my voice

not absence,

but too much.

Too much pain.

Too much remembering.

Too much pretending to be okay.

Still, I rise.

Not because healing is easy,

but because I am tired of disappearing.

Tired of being a whisper in my own story.

So when you see my eyes

don’t ask what happened.

Just know

I am still here.

And that,

after everything,

is its own kind of victory.