It wasn’t meant to be defiance, but maybe that’s the shape it took. Not the loud kind, the other kind. The kind that sits in the corner of the room, observing, and doesn’t play along. I didn’t stitch the mouth shut to speak through it. Some things ask to be held quietly. There’s something deeply resilient in that, silence not as surrender, but as signal. Low-frequency. Calibrated. Intentional. A form of resistance shaped slowly, through pressure and solitude.

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