ajwa

dear younger me,

i see you. sitting in the corner of your room
your small hands clenched into fists. your head buried into your knees
holding onto words that were too heavy to carry, but too dangerous to let go.

there’s a storm behind your lips, begging to be set free,
but nobody stops long enough to hear the storm fighting inside you.

you learned early that silence was safer, being quiet was easier than watching it be dismissed by the ones you longed to trust.
so you held it in, swallowed your pain and pressed it deep into your chest,
hoping that one day, someone would notice the weight of it all.

you wanted to tell baba, to look up into his eyes as a little girl and say i’m hurting baba
but every time you tried, the words held themselves back into your mouth,
afraid of breaking the air between you, afraid of disappointing the man who always seemed too busy, too distant, too lost in providing for our family, the moments you did have him home, you wanted to enjoy and not ruin the joy.

you wanted to tell mama too, to sit beside her, to let the truth spill from your lips like a child emptying her pockets of secrets,
but she mistook your trembling for stubbornness,
brushed past your silence as if it were nothing more than a passing mood.

so you stopped trying

you stopped asking

stopped asking for warmth in places you once felt comforted in.

and so you turned to paper, you let ink do the speaking when your voice had no place to go.
you wrote in the quiet of the night, where no one could push you away,
where the pages never sighed in frustration or told you to stop making things so complicated.

in the lines of your journals, you found a home. a place where your voices echoed back at you instead of fading into the air.
a space where you were able to free your thoughts and let them go.
where your pain was real, where your emotions mattered, where you could be heard, even if no one was listening.

and so even today, that silence is carried within you.
you hold onto it like a habit, like a piece of you you can’t leave behind.
you hesitate before speaking, weighing every word before you say anything.
as if speaking your mind will hurt the people around you.

you swallow your needs before they ever reach your lips,
because deep down, you still believe that needing is too much
that asking is too much, it means burdening
that love is given only in quiet, never in request.

you’ve learned how to exist without taking up space,
how to be the strong one, the one who doesn’t ask for more than what’s given.
and you’ve gotten so good at it that no one even notices
how much you hold back, how much you still ache for the kind of love that sees you without you having to beg for it

dear younger me,

one day, you won’t have to write just to feel seen
that your voice will not longer beg for a place at the table.
that your words will not be pushed aside, and your thoughts will be heard

one day, you will meet someone who will sit with your silence
who will sit with you until you are ready to express yourself
who won’t ask you to explain why your voice shakes
but will listen anyway, as if they have been waiting their whole life to hear you.

and with them, something will shift inside you
not all at once, not in some grand moment
but in the small things-

in the way they ask how you’re feeling and wait for your real answer
in the way they don’t turn away when your voice cracks,
in the way they don’t try to fix you,
but make space for you to be whole on your own.

you will speak about things you never thought you could say out loud.
the words you buried deep, the fears you kept inside,
the wounds you convinced yourself didn’t need taking care of
they will be released, not as confessions,
but as truths that no longer need to be held in the dark.

and when you speak, you will not be met with dismissal.
you will not be met with sighs of impatience or tired eyes that look past you
you will be met with presence, with understanding, with warmth.
and it will be the most healing thing-
to finally release the weight you have carried alone for so long.

you will learn that your voice is not too much,
that you’re not making things so complicated,
that your pain is not a burden to carry alone.
that love – real love – does not push you away

it does not ask you to be silent, to be quieter, to take up less space.
it welcomes you. it opens its hands. and for the first time, you will speak.
not because you are desperate to be heard
but because you finally feel safe enough to be understood.

it won’t erase the past, but it will remind you
that love is not meant to be earned through silence.

dear younger me,

one day, my love, you will be heard. and when that day comes,
you will know, this is what it means to be truly seen.

but even more than that,
you will know that you are more than what broke you.

because look how far you made it.
you survived the nights you thought you wouldn’t.
you built yourself out of all the pieces they left behind.
you stitched together a life out of silence and longing
and somehow still found beauty in everything.

and the future, the future is waiting for you
not as a second chance, not as a way to change the past,
but as a promise that there is more to come.

there will be a day when you look back at this,
at the weight you carried, at the silence you endured,
and you will no longer feel small, weak, abandoned.

because look at me now.

i am not the girl who wasn’t receiving enough attention
i am not the girl who had to beg to be seen or heard
i am not the girl who left with her words unspoken.
i am not just the wounds, the losses, the nights spent in quiet grief.

i am here.

speaking.

writing.

creating a life in my own voice, no longer waiting for permission to be understood.

and you, my younger self,
you were never weak for staying silent.
you were surviving, in the only way you knew how.

but now, we are done just surviving. now, we are living.
you are every moment of strength, every word you write,
every step you take toward the life that is still waiting for you.

i can’t wait for you to see how proud i am of you
for carrying more than you ever should have,
for finding a way to hold yourself together when no one else did,
for turning your silence into something beautiful, something lasting.

and through everything, i hope you are proud of me too.