The Years They Didn't See

By Ma'ayan H.

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At eight, I learned the art of vanishing—

to fold beneath the weight of weary walls,

to whisper smaller than the dust that shimmered

through my mother’s sighs and father’s silence.

I was a ghost before I knew the word,

a shadow trimming its own noise.

At nine, the playground blurred to fog.

My laughter, once a golden thing,

fell cold upon indifferent ears.

They could not see the stone I carried—

my brother’s breath, a fragile flame

I cupped against a storm.

At ten, I mourned the living things—

birthdays draped in mourning cloth,

balloons deflating in unlit rooms.

Each candle burned not bright, but blue,

its smoke a prayer for vanished joys

I swore it was fine. It had to be.

At eleven, I became the shield—

a trembling sword of words and love,

defending innocence from their stares.

Their whispers cut, their pity bruised,

yet I stood between the cruel and kind,

bleeding quiet in the in-between.

At twelve, my voice became a bell—

tolling truths they would not hear:

not all wounds are visible.

It became a hymn of mourning I didn’t know I was singing,

each repetition a crack in childhood,

each doubt from others, a small decay.

At thirteen, friendship died without a funeral.

Her back was the gravestone I could not carve.

I wandered halls like a ghost of laughter—

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transparent, forgotten, still breathing.

To be erased while standing—

that is its own kind of death.

At fourteen, I buried my name.

My heritage folded like linen in the dark,

my faith, a trembling candle in a locked drawer.

I learned to pray in silence,

to count my safety in unsaid words,

to let fear braid itself into identity.

At fifteen, the mirrors turned against me.

Eyes that lingered carved me open—

not seen, but consumed.

So I grew smaller, quieter,

stitched myself back into shadow.

Always shrinking, always less—

a hymn to invisibility.

And still—

beneath the layers of unspoken years,

beneath the hush and ache and folding—

a pulse remains.

A faint, defiant ember:

the hope

that someone, someday,

might finally see

the ghost that never died.