Brittle Becoming

I snap my fingers—hear those cracks?  

That’s the sound of a girl shaped like glass,  

fractured by silence, overlooked beneath the weight  

of a younger sister’s wheelchair wheels  

and a father’s fists.

I learned early to calibrate my voice,  

to speak just above a whisper so the bruises  

on my mother’s cheek didn’t echo in my throat.  

She kept the broken pieces of her dignity  

folded in dishcloths—too delicate for the daylight.

My sister’s laughter was a bright halo in our kitchen  

while I collected our mother’s tears in the corners,  

small and clear as dewdrops—  

visible only to me, as if I had x-ray eyes  

and a heart built to hold other people’s pain.

I became a ghost in our own home—  

gliding past the dinner table with untouched plates,  

knowing that all eyes were pinned on her new ache,  

her newest diagnosis, her need for constant tending.  

I was the girl who faded.

At night I pressed my palm to the cold windowpane  

dreaming that if I held still enough,  

I’d become part of the walls—unbreakable, transparent, unseen.  

But glass still shatters. I heard it when my father came home,  

and my mother’s screams filled each shard with sound.

I’d curl between the couch cushions,  

breathing in the rhythm of their chaos,  

praying the walls wouldn’t bleed their fury into me.  

I was the kid who learned to disappear so violence  

wouldn’t reach my sister’s small, unmoving frame.

I counted the seconds between slaps,  

mapped my body to the spaces  

where he could not touch me.  

I gathered my broken self in a Tupperware box  

marked “Not enough,” and I carried it to school.

No one taught me to ask for help—  

they’d given it all away to her, the one who could not cry.  

I practiced tears in the bathroom mirror,  

tried on sorrow like a borrowed coat—  

never realizing the fit was mine.

My voice got stuck in my ribs, a trapped bird  

beating against glass—  

until tonight, when I step onto this stage  

and let every piece of me glitter in the spotlight.  

I am the daughter of bruised hearts, shattered homes,

but I am not the echo of their pain.  

I am the one singing through shards of memory,  

reclaiming the spaces where I once hid.  

I am the glass child, yes,  

but tonight I break open—and I shine.