I used to tell myself the words I never said just died in my throat - like they curled up in the dark and faded, leaving behind a kind of graveyard made of ink and silence. But that’s a lie. That’s the version that makes it sound clean, poetic, almost soft. The truth is worse. I don’t carry a cemetery - I carry a war zone. My tongue is scarred, frightened, trained into submission. My throat - once pink and tender, a place for lullabies and laughter - is now red,
torn open, scratched raw. My voice, injured. Every time I try to speak, I feel the wreckage. I feel the claw marks. I feel the places where the words tore into me trying to get out. Not because they were dangerous - but because I kept them caged for too long. They’re not dead. They never were. They’re alive. They thrash. They dig their nails into the walls of my throat and scream into the dark that no one hears. They are not ghosts. They are hostages. And I am
their prison.
And now as I approach twenty-one, my throat feels like an open wound. It’s blistered from the inside. It’s not just sore - it’s ruined. Not by illness, but by restraint, by years of swallowing what I should’ve said. By the weight of everything I've buried just to make myself bearable. My mouth still produces saliva - warm, natural, human - and I swallow it like medicine, as if it might soothe the ache, as if it might drown the words clawing at the walls inside me. I keep hoping it’ll be enough. That it’ll coat the pain, dissolve the rage, sedate the truth. That it’ll wash the words down before they rip me open from the inside.
But they dont want to be washed down. They want out. And now they’re loud. They whimper. They groan. Sometimes they scream, trapped between my lungs and my lips. I tell myself it’s just a sore throat. Just tension. Just stress. But it’s none of that. It’s grief. It’s rage with no exit. It’s the sound of a voice that was never given permission to become.
But still, somehow, I stay silent. I don’t know if it’s fear or habit or both. I just know that every time I swallow, I feel like I'm swallowing myself. And that’s the quiet violence no one sees - not the absence of words, but the pain of carrying them. The damage of holding everything in. And I still hope - that the warmth of my own body, the softness of something as simple and human as saliva, will be enough to mend the wound my silence made. That maybe, just maybe, I can digest the pain before it digests me.

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A little bit about the author :

Name : Moona

Pronouns : she/they

Age : 22

Location : France

My hobbies are writing, acting and modeling. Some of my special interests are dinosaurs, musicals and true crime.  

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