THE FRACTURED SPEAK

I didn’t start as a warning sign.

I wasn’t born with a crack in me.

I was a whole thing once;

soft in places, stubborn in others,

trying to make sense of a world

that kept shifting the rules mid‑stride.

But pressure is patient.

It doesn’t shout;

it whispers.

It rearranges you grain by grain

until you don’t recognize

the shape you’ve become.

People say I chose this path,

as if paths don’t get carved

by a thousand unseen hands.  

As if I woke up one morning

and decided to be the breaking point.

They never ask

what weight I carried,

what silence I swallowed,

what small humiliations

stacked like stones

until the pile towered over me.

They never ask

who turned away

when I needed a witness,

or who twisted my doubts

into weapons against myself.

Instead they point at the moment;

the flash, the fracture;

and pretend that’s the whole story.

It’s easier that way.

Cleaner.

Keeps their own fingerprints

off the blueprint of my undoing.

But I know the truth:

monsters aren’t born;

they’re assembled.

Piece by piece.

Cut by cut.

By a world too proud

to admit it shapes what it fears.

I didn’t want to be the storm.

I wanted to be understood.

I wanted someone to notice

the tremor before the quake,

the plea before the silence,

the human before the headline.

If you really want to stop the cycle,

don’t study me to manipulate;

study me to understand.

Not the fracture,

but the pressure.

Not the act,

but the architecture.

Because I wasn’t inevitable.

I was preventable.

And that truth

is the one no one wants to hold.