The Unseen Scars

Hell naw, we never called the laws to our aid. In the shadows we battled, unafraid. The secrets we carried, the pain we concealed. A life lived in silence, now slowly revealed.

The dust settled in Greenchase, not the settling of peace, but the gritty accumulation of a life lived on the edge, a life where the sirens’ wail was a melody unheard, a language unlearned. We were the architects of our own survival, the silent witnesses to the blood spilled, the bullets that sang their deadly lullabies, the overdoses that stole souls in the blink of an eye. United, we stood, a tattered banner of defiance raised against the world that had long forgotten us, or perhaps, had never known us at all. The laws, they were a foreign tongue, a distant hum of a reality we never inhabited. Our justice was swift, our judgments final, etched in the unspoken pacts of the street.

My sister, she’d called it a gift, this burning ember she’d placed in my hand. Crystal meth, she’d whispered, her eyes alight with a fever that mirrored the one she was about to ignite within me. It was a promise of escape, a shimmering mirage in the desert of my despair. And I, naive as a newborn babe, reached for it, my fingers burning with a hunger I didn’t yet understand. My husband, the man who’d promised forever, found himself a ghost in the hallways of my life, replaced by a lover whose embrace was a cage, whose touch was a brand. Fifteen years, a tapestry woven with threads of betrayal and regret, unraveled in an instant, replaced by the intoxicating, destructive dance of a love that was anything but.