The Silence Before

Chapter One

There are things you remember with clarity, like a shard of glass stuck under skin—sharp, impossible to forget. And there are things your body remembers for you when your mind has gone quiet to survive.

She was five when the silence began.

It wasn’t a peaceful silence. It was the kind that falls heavy in a room where something awful has just happened. The kind of silence where the only sound left is the thundering of your own heartbeat, your breath caught somewhere between your chest and your throat. She didn’t have the words then, only the ache of knowing that something was wrong and the knowledge that she wasn’t allowed to say so.

The grown-up who hurt her smiled in public. No one saw what he did when the door closed. No one noticed her flinch when he walked by. Children are supposed to be resilient, they said. She was just sensitive, they said. But her resilience wasn’t something she was born with. It was something she carved out of necessity, from bone and instinct.

By the time she was seven, she had learned how to disappear—without ever leaving the room. She’d stare at the wall until the colors bled. She’d fix her eyes on a crack in the ceiling or the corner of a photo frame and float away inside her own head. It was safer there. Her mother had taken her favorite doll, so she discovered no one could take her hand from her. Her hand, each finger became a friend that couldn’t be taken away. Inside her mind, she could become anyone. Someone braver. Someone who didn’t cry when he touched her. Someone who could scream without anyone hearing.

She never told. Who would believe a child with dirt on her knees and too many questions in her eyes?

One night, she woke up with a sharp pain between her legs and the taste of iron in her mouth. No one took her to the doctor. When she limped for days, they said it was growing pains. But she knew.Even as a child, she knew what happened. Her body knew.

Touch was worse. Her skin was not skin—it was memory. A living, breathing battleground. Every inch had a story, and most of them were sexually violent. She never asked for her body to remember what her mind worked so hard to forget, but it did anyway—in the way she flinched at kindness, in the way she pulled away from lovers, in the way she could never fully relax even when she was safe.

She grew up thinking her body was the enemy. That she was fat and ugly. That her butt was too big. Her breast were too small. She grew up being weighed each day and was shamed when gaining even a pound. 

And when you believe that you are worthless, you learn to punish her.

Sometimes it was cutting. The blade was sterile, the pain honest. In a world that had robbed her of control, this—at least—was hers. She didn’t do it to die. She did it to feel. Or sometimes, not feel at all. 

Other times, it was starvation. She’d count orange slices, skip meals, dance until her ankles gave out. Hunger was a distraction, a substitute for the gnawing grief inside. Being thin didn’t make her happy, but it made her invisible, and that felt safer than being seen.

Sex was complicated. Her relationship with it was a pendulum swing—hypersexuality, then complete shutdown. For a while, she used it like currency. A way to get what she needed, a way to feel desired, if not wanted. Love was a word related to sex, and also a kind of yearning that . Lust, she could handle, she wanted to be held.

But even that had consequences. Too many nights ended in regret, in dissociation, in crying quietly under another stranger’s sheets. She wondered if anyone would ever touch her without waking the ghosts inside.

Then came the woman.

She hadn’t expected her. Hadn’t been looking. But love—real love—came in soft hands and slow patience. The woman traced her scars without flinching, touched her like she was whole. She didn’t try to fix her. She just stayed.

That was almost worse. Because now, she had something to lose.

And still, she pushed. Still, she ran. She sabotaged before she could be abandoned. She hurt people before they had the chance to walk away. It was easier to break your own heart than to wait for someone else to do it.

But slowly—achingly slowly—she began to listen.

To her body.

To her breath.

To the parts of her that weren’t screaming anymore.

She bought lotion and used it without disgust. She walked around barefoot and let the earth remind her that she was still here. She stood naked in the mirror and whispered, This is real. This is real. This is me. 

 

Years later, a hospital record confirmed what her silence had always known: a fractured pelvis. A broken bone at the age of three. Her mother said she fell off the chain-linked fence. But even then, deep down, she had known that porches didn’t do that to little girls.

That’s when the first alter showed up. She wouldn’t know her name for years—only that there was suddenly someone else who could take the pain when she couldn’t. A shadow self. A protector. A voice inside her that said, I’ll handle it. And so she let her.

And that’s how she survived.

Not by healing, but by separating.

Not by forgetting, but by hiding the truth so deep inside that only pieces of her ever had to carry it at a time.

The silence never left her. It clung to her skin, wrapped around her throat. It followed her into school, into womanhood, into every room where someone said they loved her.

This was the beginning—not of her trauma, but of her fragmentation.

Of becoming many to survive the one.