damakaia

when i was a child, i heard a story about a time before words. a time when people spoke in birdsong. trills, warbles, winding coos; sounds that curved like wind through reeds. soft, fluid, without the harsh break of consonants or the jarring clang of hard vowels. nothing that could be misheard. no syntax to fail you. just music. just motion. a language that ran through all things. a language you felt in the bones. now, the world overflows with language. french. spanish. farsi. german. english. hindi. arabic. countless tongues, countless systems — each promising understanding, each offering the illusion of closeness. and yet, i have never felt more voiceless. language is supposed to bind us together. it should be a bridge, a rope between islands. instead, it’s often a door slammed too fast, a lock we never learned how to pick. i say one thing. you hear another. meanings unravel between us like thread pulled loose from a sleeve. we mispronounce what matters. we hesitate at the wrong tim...

the moment i realize i am being seen is a jarring one. it happens all at once, or maybe it's happening slowly over time, and i just don’t notice until it is too late. until someone says you’re twenty-one in a way that makes me understand they are not. until someone says you’re a woman in a way that makes me understand that i am, in fact, not just a person, not just a being moving through the world, but something particular, something pre-defined. i do not think of myself as a woman, not in the way they think of me as one. i do not think of myself as young, not in the way they remind me i am. i think of myself as myself, which is to say, not as a body, not as a collection of traits, but as a mind, an observer. when i walk into a room, i do not think about how i appear in it. when i speak, i do not hear the voice of a twenty-one-year-old woman; i hear myself. but then someone makes a remark, says something offhand, and i feel it like a shift in the ground beneath me. i had not been ...

in the late afternoon light — heavy, gold, indifferent — i make my way home in a silence that no longer feels vacant. once, it did. once, it scratched at the walls, an absence so loud it felt like a scream. now it’s something else. now it fits. i wear it like a second skin. i used to want connection. or thought i did. i wanted laughter. voices. the sound of people existing near me, around me. i went looking for it in the usual places. crowded rooms, overfull conversations. i mistook presence for intimacy. i mistook noise for closeness. i watched. i waited. it never came. but time dulls even the sharpest longing. eventually, you stop reaching. eventually, the reaching itself is the thing that hurts. and when you let it go, when you stop hoping, what remains is quieter. easier. not better, exactly. just more honest. i thought i needed people. for a while, i did. the way you need heat when your bones go cold. but something changed. the warmth, when it came, felt like too much. the touch, ...