First message
Her face pressed against my leg, she curls into the chair, shielding me from the world. I feel her skin through the numbness, a ghost of touch my nerves struggle to recall. She thinks I’m gone, at least the part of me that mattered. The others look at me as if I’m furniture, a relic, a coffin that refuses to close. But she never wavers. She comes daily, speaking into my silence, filling it with stories, secrets, laughter I can’t answer, tears I can’t wipe away. I’ve lived in that prison, wordless, motionless, raging behind still eyes. Yet, her voice kept me tethered to myself.
Now, her breath trembles against me, warm with grief she doesn’t speak aloud. Something in me aches to break free, not for air or survival, but for her. My throat burns, the word clawing upward, jagged and foreign.
I force it through lips that have been useless for years, and the sound rips out of me like a cracked bell. “Sister.”