Chapter 1: The Beginning Of Silence
I was born into love.
Or at least, that’s how it felt in the beginning.
My mother’s laughter filled our small room. My father’s voice carried warmth even when he came home tired. We didn’t have much, but in those early years, I never noticed lack — I only noticed love.
But love has a way of changing.
Not because it disappears… but because life presses so hard that it gets buried under survival.
By the time I was six, everything had shifted.
My parents were still there, but they were no longer present.
My father left before sunrise and returned when I was already asleep. My mother’s hands were always busy — always working, always tired.
They were surviving.
And I became something they didn’t notice anymore.
Not because I didn’t matter… but because survival was louder than me.
At first, I tried.
I called out. I followed. I waited.
But slowly, I learned that love was no longer something I could reach — it was something I had to compete with hunger for.
And hunger always won.
It was in that silence that something else began to enter.
At first, it was small things — moments I didn’t understand, touches that made my body freeze, feelings I couldn’t name but somehow knew were wrong.
I didn’t speak.
Not because I didn’t want to…
But because I didn’t know how.
And because no one was listening anyway.
So I learned the easiest lesson a child can learn:
Be quiet.
Be small.
Be invisible.
And in that house where love used to live…
I began to disappear.
