I did not write this book
because the bruises faded.
I wrote it because they didn’t—
not really.
They changed color.
Moved inward.
Learned to hide beneath skin
no one thought to search.
They became flinches.
Locked doors.
Apologies I never owed.
Memories that still knew
exactly where to hurt.
So I gave them paper.
I let every purple memory
bleed itself into ink.
I let the silence split open.
I let the girl I used to be
crawl out from between the lines
with dirt beneath her nails
and her name still in her mouth.
What the Bruises Remember
is not a grave for what happened.
It is proof
that I survived the burial.
These pages do not belong
to the hands that hurt me.
They do not belong
to the mouths that rewrote me,
the rooms that swallowed my voice,
or the ghosts who thought
I would carry their version forever.
They belong to me.
To the woman who learned
that healing is not forgetting.
That surviving is not silence.
That a scar can be both
a wound that closed
and a door that finally opened.
If you open this book,
you will not find me
begging to be believed.
You will find me standing
in the wreckage,
gathering every broken piece
they thought would make me smaller
and building a spine from it.
My bruises remembered everything.
So I taught them
how to write.
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