The second mouth in your head

Ember VI | A letter found behind a shelf

Marble VI performed the mask.
Ember remembers what it costs to wear it.

---

The boxes were still open.

I hadn’t decided where anything would go. That is what moving is, at first—a prolonged act of not yet, with objects waiting on the floor for days and rooms waiting to become rooms.

I was pulling newspaper from around a lamp when I found it. Folded twice, and then once more, flattened between the shelf and the wall. I thought it was a bill. Then I saw the shadow of handwriting.

I hesitated.

You don’t open something like that lightly. It might not be meant for anyone else to read. It might carry things better left there.

I unfolded it.

---

I’m tired.

Tired of waking already braced against words you haven’t even said yet because I know them. I know their shape. They live in the walls now. In me. You built a second mouth in my head and it sounds exactly like you.

You’re nothing.
You’re useless.
You’ll never be anything.

Again.
Again.
Again.

Do you hear yourself?

Do you enjoy it?

You say that like you’re passing the salt. Like it’s fact. Like I’m some blank thing waiting to be defined by whatever poison you spill that day. Like my failure was decided by God himself.

And I swallowed it. I swallowed it all.

Every time you looked at me like there was nobody home. Every time I handed you proof of life and you threw it away like trash.

And after a while it gets inside me.

That’s the worst part.

How your voice crawls into my head and starts speaking like me.

I hear you before I hear myself.
I fail before I begin.
I shrink before I speak.

By the time I open my mouth, I’m already apologizing for existing. That’s what you did. You taught me to disappear so you wouldn’t have to bother doing it out loud.

You’ve done this for years.

Years.

Do you know what it is to live like that? To hear it long enough that you start doing it to yourself?

I am doing things.

I have been all along.

I was building while you called me empty.
Bleeding into my own hands while you called me lazy.
Barely holding myself together while you stood there calling me nothing.

You stare at effort and dismiss it. You stare at growth and call it failure. You stare at a living human being and insist there’s nobody there.

And I carried that.

Like an idiot.

I kept telling myself to endure. To get through it. Just brace a little longer.

Until endurance stops being strength.

It becomes self-destruction.

You don’t get to do that anymore.

You don’t get to carve your version of me into my skin and call it truth.

I am not your disappointment.

I am not your mistake waiting to happen.

I am not nothing.

I never was.

I was surrounded by people who needed me to believe it.

I am tired of having to prove

that I exist.”

---

The letter was still in my hands. My fingers had tightened around the paper.

The refrigerator kicked on with a low hum.

So loud.

I folded the letter the way I found it. Twice, then once more.

I didn’t know who had written it. If it had been meant to be sent or if writing it had been enough. I didn’t know if they had left this house angry, or lighter, or just done.

I placed it in the drawer. The wood stuck for a moment, swollen from the winter. I closed it. If they ever came for it, I’d give it back.

The lamp was still there, half-wrapped. I pulled the paper away and looked around. Near the door, maybe. I set it there, adjusted it slightly, then left it.

I thought about the sentence.

“You are nothing.”

How long can someone hear that before they begin to believe it?

I opened the box of plates and set them on the counter.

I did not finish the thought.

---

Some identities are performed.
Others are imposed.

---

Marble showed what happened. Ember named the wound.
If it resonates, Marble & Ember continues every week.

- 🜛 Angela
Marble & Ember

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