After the Breaking”

I learned my name in the language of silence, where even prayers echoed back unanswered. The world did not fall apart at once— it cracked slowly, like glass left too long in the cold, until I could see through it and still not trust what I saw. I carried pain like folded laundry, neat on the outside, heavy where no one looked. But even in that weight, something in me refused extinction— a small, stubborn light that would not agree to disappear. So I stopped asking why and started asking how to keep breathing inside what tried to bury me. And I found this truth: some endings are not endings— they are doors we survive walking through.