Therapy Bits

There are rooms inside me that no one visits.
Each one smells of dust and old rain, echoes with the sound of footsteps that never belonged to a child.
I learned early how to vanish: to slip out of my own skin, to become smoke, to let the hurt happen to someone else.
They said children are resilient. They didn’t say what that resilience costs — how many selves must be born to bear the weight of one small body.

Sometimes I still hear them whispering, the ghosts of my own making.
One hums to herself to drown out the shouting.
Another stands guard at the door, fists tight, eyes dry.
There’s one who still believes love can be safe, though she hides her hope like contraband.
They all wear my face, but none of them are me alone.

Memory comes in fragments — the sound of a belt, the hiss of words that cut like wire, the stillness after.
The body remembers what the mind disowns.
So I became a house of mirrors: every reflection a version of survival.
When they finally gave it a name — dissociative identity disorder — it wasn’t a curse, it was a translation.
A way to say: I am still here, even if “I” is many.

And sometimes, in the quiet between heartbeats, I gather them close.
We sit together, all my names, all my broken miracles,
and I whisper to the smallest one,
It wasn’t your fault. You don’t have to disappear anymore.
The walls breathe easier then.
For a moment, the house is whole.

Demon – Word of the Day Challenge