Everything is dark
Silence
But not the calm kind of silence
It's the kind that weighs on your chest and whispers, something is going to hurt
I open my eyes. Or I think I do
There's a faint light — yellowish, trembling — like a streetlamp tired of trying to illuminate the world
And then, the smell
Mold
The creak of the ceiling fan
Broken toys in the corner
God
It's my old room
"No..." I try to say. But my voice doesn't come out
I'm here
Again
In the skin of the old me
Six years old
Messy hair. Empty eyes
That expression of someone who... has already given up on being saved
The door opens
"Clean up this shit, Lígia" my mother's voice is a whip wrapped in cheap perfume
"Want to live like a pig"
The girl — me — nods. Too quickly
She tries to pick up the shards of the broken glass
The hand comes before the guilt
The slap stings less than the look
It was always the look
The contempt. The exhaustion. The frustration dumped on a child's body
Rage
The current version — the one observing — boils with rage
But she can't do anything
She's only a witness
The memories crash in
Nine years old
At school. The teacher writes on the board
I pretend to take notes
The long sleeves hide the bruises
Even in the heat
A classmate smiles
I lower my head
You can't let anyone see
Connections are dangerous
Confessing is opening the door to hell
Thirteen
Depression becomes a suffocating blanket
Pain — a constant hum
The scars... drafts no one wanted to read
That night, she tries
Locked bathroom
Razor behind the mirror
One cut. Another
But...
She survives
The blade fails
The blood clots
The body — for some cruel reason — refuses to give up
"I hated being alive" I say
"But something deep down... didn't want to die"
Sixteen
She runs
Shelters. Lies. Silence
She learns to disappear
The mother dies
The father... vanishes
She returns
Alone
Cold on the outside
Chaos inside
The scene changes
The house
Yellowing walls
Peeling paint
Smell of dampness and cheap soap
Even the air is heavy inside
My footsteps echo dully
Time walks backward
I enter the room
"It's still the same" I whisper
Torn books
Old notebooks
The mirror — crooked, cracked in the corner
The same mirror where I learned to hate myself
My past version is there
Curled up
A badly drawn shadow
She stands
Leaves the house
The street is empty
The night swallows her
She pulls up her hood like she's trying to hide from her own existence
"Where are you going, Lígia" I ask
But I already know
Far away
From everything
From everyone
Mostly... from herself
Later
A simple room
Old computer
Screen glowing in the dead of night
Adult Lígia obsessively reads a webnovel
Devours words like drinking water in a desert
Heroines who bloom
Villains who redeem themselves
Happy endings — always happy endings
Around her, piles of books
Romance. Fantasy
Fiction. Drama
Anything but reality
"I didn't want a degree" I mutter
"I just wanted to disappear... without vanishing
To breathe, without living
To exist... without remembering"
She reads until the sun rises
In fiction, she finds what life never gave her
Magic. Affection. Belonging
While she dreams, she doesn't hurt
While she reads... she exists
"That's what kept me alive
It wasn't courage
It was escape
But... that's okay"
Even the weak deserve to survive
And sometimes...
The weak are just too strong to fall
And then, the day of the accident
Rain
Distraction
Glass
Scream
Darkness
And...
Rebirth
Back to darkness
The light of memory fades
But the echoes remain
My eyes are wet
"I survived all of that
I don't know how
But I did"
And I'm here
Here
No matter how many times the world tried to break me...
I'm still standing
Still breathing
Still fighting
Because if I'm no one's heroine...
I'm the survivor of my own story