When we bring dark material
into the room—
what angers, upsets,
or unsettles us—
it is allowed to live there
only when the pain
is socially legible—
when it can be spoken
in a publicly acceptable grammar.
You clap.
You nod.
You snap your fingers in recognition…
Recognition of centuries
of past social and physical harm.
You understand because you have already
been taught how to understand.
In some rooms, society’s injuries are welcomed.
Racism should be named.
Violence can be named,
if not mourned and rightfully
inspiring indignation.
Collective grief, injustice, poverty, exclusion,
and oppression can be named.
There are histories for these wounds.
There are movements, statistics,
symbols, and words.
There are other people who can stand and say:
This happened to me too.
But even in those rooms,
empathy may not be strong
enough to hold the uniquely individual injury
or the thing so improbable that
no one
has prepared a language for it.
The thing that does not represent
a community,
illustrate a familiar injustice,
or fit inside a recognized story of survival.
An injury without witnesses.
A memory belonging to one person
alone,
even in a room full of people.
And yet,
nearly everyone,
all of you,
have something -
unspeakable.
Something that happened
to you.
Something you know
must remain
unmentioned.
Something placed in a hidden room
of the mind so ordinary life can continue
outside it.
What happened to you that
you do not discuss?
What do you hide
as though it were
your fault?
What undeserved shame
do you share only with a therapist -
or with no one?
Of course, these are
rhetorical questions.
It is not as though you will utter
the unspeakable.
Not here.
Not in front of people
waiting for your pain to become
familiar before they can recognize it.
Perhaps you have no need to speak.
Perhaps silence protects what remains yours.
Perhaps you have learned to place
the memory somewhere
it cannot interrupt the day.
What allows you to put on
the mask
of forgetting?
How do you walk into a room
without being haunted by
the ghost walking beside you?
How do you laugh without first
explaining what survived inside you?
Without explaining
what didn’t kill you
but surely made you
weaker.
How do you enjoy your life without
asking anyone to understand what happened?
And what becomes of those
who cannot?