Inside the jar…where hurricanes hide beneath her ribs

She learned early
that silence has teeth,
that air can curdle
when footsteps in the hall
taught floorboards fear.

She learned the smallness of survival:
how to make herself thinner than breath,
how to tuck whole hurricanes
beneath her ribs
and call it composure.

She hid her fear
like splintered glass
beneath her tongue
and learned not to choke on it.

After that,
she lived inside a jar made of yesterday:
clear enough
to watch the world glowing,
sealed enough
to never quite belong to it.

From the outside
she looked almost ordinary:
a woman counting coins at the bakery,
saying “fine” before anyone asked,
beneath familiar skies.

But inside,
she still drifted
in the salted brine
of old hands,
old nights,
old doors
that never closed to keep her safe.

Abandonment
was weather.
She fell into it
the way others fall asleep.
It settled on her shoulders,
in her laughter,
in the way she flinched
even from kindness.

There were days
when even sunlight
felt like rumor:
something that landed
on rooftops,
on strangers’ shoulders,
but never entered her.

There were seasons in her
that never reached the window.
whole blizzards
locked behind her sternum,
snowing over her heart
no one ever saw.

For a long time,
she believed
this was all life would be:
her forehead to glass,
her heart preserved
like something
once meant to be saved.

But one morning,
a shaft of sun
climbed the curve of the glass
until it found her face.
So gently
she mistook it
for the world reaching back.

Then she raised her hand.

Not brave.
Not healed.

Only tired
of surviving
instead of living.

Her fingertips
found the wall.

And there
a tremor.
Fine as the first crack in ice
just before the river
remembers
it was made to move.

She did not pull away.
That was enough.

Because hope
did not come like rescue.

It came
like a hairline fracture in glass.
Like warmth
returning
to a place gone numb.

Now each morning,
she lays her hand
against the wall.

Not because she is certain.
But because something in her
has begun
to believe the light.

One day,
the glass
will no longer hold
the shape of her breath.

It will shatter,
and she will step out,
barefoot,
into a morning
that asks nothing of her

except to stay,
to stop living
against the light,
and finally
live inside it.

And when she steps into the world,
she will not enter it as someone rescued,
but as someone
who carried her own pulse
through the dark
until it became a lantern.