Cacophony

There’s a certain kind of noise that lives inside the body—a shape-shifting dissonance that distorts and bends. A clamor of inherited rules, voices not your own, instincts to override, desires to smother. It builds thick like static, layering over itself until you can’t tell where the noise ends and you begin.

You learn to perform, to nod, to swallow words before they ever take shape. You mistake the weight for belonging. You mistake the silence for safety. But the body knows. The facade cracks. The old frequencies start to falter. The wreckage of compliance begins to loosen its grip.

And beneath it? Something else entirely. A stillness that isn’t empty but full. A listening that doesn’t strain for approval. A voice, steady and unshaken, rising through the collapse.

Because cacophony cannot hold. It buckles under its own weight. And what remains is the only thing that was ever real.