The cruelest wound isn't always drawn in blood.
Sometimes it's the slow erasure of your presence
by the very hand that once reached for yours.

They call it silence, but it's louder than screaming.
A deliberate void where warmth used to live,
a calculated absence that says, without a single word:

You are nothing.
Your hurt is invisible.
Your need for me is inconvenient.
You only earn my gaze when you shrink small enough
to fit the shape I've decided you're allowed to be.

This is not quiet.
This is annihilation dressed as indifference.
It dismantles you piece by piece:
first the certainty of your own voice,
then the belief that your feelings have weight,
finally the core knowing that you deserve to be seen.

You start chasing ghosts for scraps of acknowledgment—
a text, a glance, a crumb of normalcy—
because the pain of begging is still better
than the terror of being permanently unmade.

You swallow shame like water,
convince yourself the fault must be yours:
too needy, too loud, too much,
even when the only crime was existing fully.

In the end, the deepest scar isn't the silence itself.
It's the way you learn to apologize for breathing
in a room they’ve decided no longer holds space for you.

But hear this:
their refusal to look at you does not make you disappear.
It only reveals the smallness of their heart.

You are not erased.
You are still here—
whole, aching, real.
And the moment you stop waiting
for them to remember your worth
is the moment you begin to walk out of the shadow
they tried to trap you in forever.

Rise from that hollow quiet.
Speak your name into the air.
Let it echo back louder than their absence ever could.

Ancestral Healing
Art: Giant Cat in the Snow Forest - Monokubo