This is the story of a girl who has been silent for too long, holding the weight of other people's voices within her. They say she was born in silence, and her first cry was so quiet that the forest itself mistook it for the wind. Since then, she learned to listen, but not to speak.

She wandered in the labyrinths of other people's rules and expectations, losing who she was with every step. Her shadow grew longer, and her reflection grew dimmer. The world around her grew dull and cracked, as if echoing her inner silence, her tired heart.

In her hands rested a skull, a memory of what had once lived, burned, meant. Now it was repressed, forgotten. But she still carried it.

The columns around her, traces of an ancient temple, were cut by time, covered with cracks, like old maps. And yet, it was in these cracks, in this seemingly dead stone, that white flowers began to sprout. They grew without soil, without sun, nourished only by memory.

They say that returning to oneself always begins with destruction. Where something fails, where the last support collapses, there for the first time there appears space for new breathing.

Sometimes, to hear yourself, you need to reach the very edge.

She reached it.

And it was there that the road back began.

🖤 Hand drawn digitally, 2025