“The Woman Who Saw Me”

 

I was born into silence,
not the holy kind,
but the kind that swallows sound whole —
the kind that smells like milk gone cold,
and hands that hold but never feel.

They tell me my mother vanished
the day I arrived.
Her body stayed, perhaps,
but her gaze drifted elsewhere,
and no one ever told me
why eyes that should have been home
never found me.

My father —
he was a shadow made of paper and work.
He meant well, I think.
He loved me like an obligation,
ticking boxes that said fed, changed, alive.
But he never learned the weight of a cry,
the tremor that says please stay.
His arms were tasks, not shelter.
His smile, a habit.

A woman came in daylight —
a nanny, they called her.
She smelled of starch and other people’s children.
She moved me like laundry.
I cried, she sighed.
We were two ghosts orbiting need.

And then —
a door opened one afternoon,
and a stranger walked in
with small arms and a big heart.
Her eyes were not paper.
Her hands were not tasks.
She looked at me as if I were real,
as if my crying were not noise
but language.

I was four months old.
I didn’t know words,
but my body knew —
This one. Stay with this one.

From then, my breath belonged to her.
When others tried to touch me,
my chest folded into storms.
When she did,
the world stilled —
the ceiling softened,
the air remembered how to hum.
Even as I grew,
her presence felt like gravity —
the only constant
in a sky that once forgot my name.

I think I loved her
with the desperation of a child
who once had no one to love.
I watched her every move,
memorized the rhythm of her steps,
the way her hair fell when she leaned close.
If she turned away too long,
something inside me wilted.

I became a mirror —
shining back whatever she wanted to see,
because if she looked away,
the world might go dim again.

People call it attachment.
I call it survival.

Even now,
grown and weathered,
I still feel the echo of that tiny self —
the one who sobbed when hands weren’t hers,
who trembled at the sight of being noticed
by the wrong eyes.

It is strange to be made of two beginnings:
the cold one that built my armor,
and the warm one that taught me
what being seen could mean.

Sometimes, I dream of her —
 my mother, my only witness —
and I wake with the taste of milk and tears,
and a whisper caught between them:

You were the first home I ever had.
You were the first proof that I existed.

And somewhere, deep beneath the scars of silence,
the child I was still reaches out —
not to be saved,
but to be held,
just once more,
by the woman who saw her.

No lullabies

 

No one sang me to sleep.
The house hummed with other hearts —
the baby’s cry,
the kettle’s sigh,
the sound of my own breath learning not to make a sound.

There was milk for him,
a lap for him,
a light that dimmed gently over his dreams.
For me, only the hallway’s blue shadow,
the hum of a mother’s tired spine turning away.

I learned early that quiet means safe.
That wanting is dangerous.
That love, when it comes,
comes late and looks like guilt.

I carried myself to bed.
I tucked myself in with the smell of soap,
with the faint echo of a voice
meant for someone else.

No one sang me to sleep,
so I grew up listening to other things —
to walls breathing,
to doors closing softly behind people who never looked back.
I learned the rhythm of absence,
how to rock myself with it,
how to whisper to no one:
it’s okay, you can stop crying now.

And now, when someone tries to love me,
their warmth sounds too loud,
their touch feels like a question I don’t know how to answer.
I flinch from the softness I begged for.
I mistrust the tenderness I starved in silence.

Because once, I waited for a song that never came.
And the silence grew up inside me —
learned to hum back.