Try to laugh.
Your mouth won’t open.
Good. Stop asking.
Try to smile.
Your face doesn’t remember how.
Let it forget.
Pull your skin straight.
It doesn’t move.
Your lips are tied shut like evidence.
Your eyes lock forward.
Don’t blink.
Your cheeks burn—
that’s rage, not warmth.
What happened to you?
Say it again. Louder.
No one answers.
What happened to your red lips?
Your blue eyes?
What happened to the person who used them?
Feel nothing.
Force it.
Fail at it.
Time stops.
You don’t move.
You don’t heal.
You stand there—
not alive, not dead—
a body full of pressure
with nowhere to go.
You are not frozen.
You are restrained.
You are not empty.
You are loaded.
Call it numbness if it helps.
Call it survival if it doesn’t.
You are not a ghost.
You are what remains
after everything that mattered
was taken without asking.
About the Creator
Keep reading
More stories from Dagmar Goeschick and writers in Poets and other communities.
Winter Ritual
Winter arrives without asking. It comes quietly, often overnight, when the world has decided to slow down. Winter is cold. Winter is white. Winter lasts three long months—sometimes more—and sometimes it comes with snow, and sometimes only with the promise of it. Either way, it changes everything.
By Dagmar GoeschickExclusive • 2 months ago
Comments
There are no comments for this story
Be the first to respond and start the conversation.