There's a box under my bed that I never open.
It's old now—edges curled, corners bruised from time and travel. It smells faintly of ink and paper, of age and hesitation. Inside are pages I never dared to share. Notebooks filled with thoughts too sharp, too soft, too messy to be held by anyone else's hands. There are letters I wrote in fury and folded in regret. Half-born poems that never found their last line. Stories that start, stutter, and go silent.
Sometimes I sit beside it in the early hours of morning, back against the wall, knees pulled close, and just look at it. Like it might speak first. Like it owes me something. But it never does.
I started writing when I was nine. My mother gave me a small spiral notebook—pink with fading stars—and told me it was mine to "keep my secrets safe." I took that to heart. I filled those pages with more than secrets; I filled them with spells. With silent screams. With the kind of truths no child should know how to name.
When the house got loud with anger, I turned to the quiet scratch of pen on paper. When I didn't understand the ache behind my ribs, I wrote it down until the ache had shape. I wrote about invisible monsters and gave them names—Anger, Silence, Regret. I gave them homes in caves and shadows and my father's whiskey glass. I wrote about heroes, too—usually girls who looked like me but weren't afraid of their voice. I envied them.
By the time I was fifteen, I had filled a drawer. Seven notebooks, two hundred loose pages, three poems scrawled on napkins. And I had let no one read a single word. My writing was mine. My protection. My confessional. My rebellion.
But it was also my prison.
The older I got, the more conflicted I felt. I studied literature in college. Sat in classrooms with people who quoted Baldwin and Plath with their chins high. I listened to them dissect metaphors while I kept mine buried. They read their work aloud, brave and broken and burning. I envied their courage. I wondered what it would feel like to be that free.
Once, in a workshop, I was told to bring something "personal." I submitted a short story—distant, fictional, safe. The professor scribbled, "Feels guarded. What are you really trying to say?" I wanted to tell her that what I was really trying to say lived in a box under my bed. That it trembled when touched. That it had learned silence from survival.
But I didn't say anything. I smiled. I nodded. I swallowed the truth like I always had.
You see, I wasn't afraid of writing. I was afraid of being seen.
Afraid that if I handed over a piece of my voice, someone would hand it back broken.
It wasn't that I didn't have something to say.
It was that I didn't believe I had permission to say it.
---
Years passed. I wrote in margins, in between jobs and heartbreaks.
I collected rejection emails like trophies I never asked for.
I started stories and buried them under deadlines and doubt.
My voice grew softer—not from lack of use, but from lack of faith.
And then one night, I met her.
She was a stranger. Or maybe a mirror.
We were both at a low-lit café, the kind where music hums low and the smell of coffee mixes with rain. She sat at the next table, scribbling in a leather-bound journal. When her pen ran out of ink, I offered her mine.
We talked.
She asked me what I did. I shrugged. "Nothing special," I said.
She looked at me like she saw past the lie. "What would you do if you weren't afraid?"
Something cracked inside me.
"I'd let someone read what I wrote."
She leaned in close, her voice soft but steady.
"Then do it. Or you'll spend your whole life being the one person who never heard their own voice."
---
That night, I went home and pulled the box out from under my bed. I didn't even dust it off. I sat cross-legged in front of it like a child opening a long-lost gift.
I reached inside, pulled out a random page.
My hands shook. My throat was dry.
But I read it.
Aloud.
Just once.
It wasn't perfect. The lines were messy. The imagery inconsistent.
But it was honest. And it was mine.
I cried when I finished.
Not because it was painful—because it was real.
I had found the voice I buried.
Not a polished, loud, marketable voice. But the real one.
The one I had muted for years.
The one that knew how to tremble and speak anyway.
Since then, I've written differently.
Not always confidently. But truthfully.
Sometimes the words still stutter. Sometimes I still hide. But more often now, I speak. Even if the only person listening is me.
I still keep the box. But it's no longer hidden. It sits on a shelf above my desk. Next to newer notebooks, all open, all unfinished—but not unread.
---
Ink isn't meant to stay silent.
It's meant to smudge, stain, scream, and save.
And so am I.