worldsaway

Where is the anger, they ask.
As if it’s something misplaced—
keys, phone, a missing shoe.

It should be here.
It should be loud.
It should be burning.

But I was raised in a house
where fire meant danger,
so I learned to be water.

Still.
Quiet.
Contained.

Only happiness was allowed to exist
without consequence.
Everything else—
swallowed, softened, erased.

So anger never learned my name.

Now, I tell my story
and watch it ignite in other people—
a spark catching in their chests,
spreading, fast and immediate.

They burn for me.
For what was done.
For what was never given.

Their voices sharpen—
How could they?
How dare they?

And I sit there,
hands folded in my lap,
holding nothing but the echo
of a softer grief.

Because anger, to me,
has always sounded like breaking—
walls, voices, promises—
followed by apologies that evaporate
before morning.

Anger is a storm
that never actually leaves.

So I said no to it.
Closed the door.
Locked it.
Swallowed the key.

Until one day,
I bought a notebook
and named it rage.

As if giving it a place
might make it safer.

The first page trembled under my hand.
Then split open.

Words poured out—
sharp, jagged, unrecognizable.
A language I didn’t know I spoke.

Ink turned to heat.
Heat turned to something alive.

I felt it—
rising,
pressing,
spilling over the edges of me.

Look what she did.
Look what I survived.
Look at me.

The anger arrived all at once—
not as chaos,
but as truth
with nowhere left to hide.

And it was terrifying.

Too big.
Too loud.
Too much.

I wanted to throw it out of my body—
shatter it against something,
anything,
just to make it stop.

Because if it stayed,
if it rooted itself inside me,
what would I become?

But it didn’t destroy me.

It moved through me.

A storm, yes—
but one that finally broke.

And when it passed,
it left something behind:

space.

Breath.
Silence that didn’t feel like punishment.

The kind that lets things grow.

Now the anger lives quieter.
A small flame,
not a wildfire.

It flickers when it needs to—
a signal,
not a threat.

And in the space it made,
other things have started to return:

joy,
soft and unfamiliar,
like sunlight through a window
I didn’t know could open.

Grief,
deeper now,
but honest.

And me—
feeling,
for the first time,
like I belong inside my own body.

Strange,
that the thing I was taught to fear
would be the thing
that made room for everything else.

Strange,
that anger—
quiet, steady, alive—
would be what saved me.