Adena M'lynn's Voice

Listen here.  YouTube  Life is a Bible. Outside, leather-bound, creased like valleys carved by time, worn smooth by hands that needed answers long before they had words for their questions. On the front— Holy Bible. Not just a title. Not just gold letters. But a cry. A longing. Stamped deep enough to last a lifetime. A reminder that somewhere in these pages— there’s my directions home. I flip to the table of contents, and wonder if my life has one. Would it list beginnings… betrayals… wars fought in silence? Would joy be a Psalm— short, melodic, gone too soon? Would warning be a prophet’s voice— fire spilling from his mouth? There’s a space for my name— scribbled in childhood handwriting, crooked, innocent, a little girl wanting to believe, she belonged in the story. And there’s a tree. Roots in Eden. Branches heavy with apples and nuts— fruit sweet enough to nourish, shells hard enough to break me. Wisdom and foolishness, growing side by side. I learned young— one bite can bo...

She stands at the edge of something unnamed, A silence so loud it swallows her name. One hand holds a check— numbers scrawled like prophecy, Enough to help… or seal her fate. The other, a gun—cold, certain, direct, No legal fees. No chance to reflect. The voices, relentless, curl close to her ear, “Just do it,” they whisper, feeding her fear. They don’t say which— Click or ink. Bang or bank. They just want silence and don’t care who to thank. She does the math, A debt that never sleeps, She’s worth more dead,  Living cost more than she’s worth Hope is a rumor, Help’s just a ghost, And faith—well, it costs what she doesn’t have most. She pictures two possibilities — and neither is life.  One gets a funeral, the other a number. She breathes like a woman learning how to drown, while standing on solid ground. Then— one hand lowers. She prays one more time. Because not all choices end in a switch. Sometimes she wants life. Sometimes she wants death. Sometimes she just wants to disa...