On Moth Wings

I have never been a mother in this life, perhaps long ago in another I was, but in this life I am not... in this life I cannot. In this life my body will not allow it.
In this life I am a mother robbed, because someone I almost loved for a day was never born. My body is a temple of pain and betrayal, my body is hollow, a vessel broken. My body is an urn; no life lie within.
I never got to consider, I never got to deliberate, I never got to grieve out loud. I was ashamed of my body, for myself, of my naivete.
I cannot shake that shame, and I can't shake the pain.
I cannot speak out because it's seen as uncouth, the "price" for my foolish and "sinful" youth.
I cannot speak because I have been shamed and it burns me.
It burns in me like coal, colorless and ink dark in the depth of the Phoenix and her core.
"It was probably better that way."
Maybe it was but that doesn't negate the pain, that doesn't stop this ever-present rain that chokes my flame.
"You said you never wanted kids anyway."
That doesn't mean someone else didn't want what I wasn't ready to hold. That doesn't mean I can't change, or maybe it does.
"Maybe it means you weren't ready."
What it means to me is that my "disgrace" could have been the saving to another.
I spent three years holding the words in. I spent three years hiding from the light, hiding a hidden shame. I spent 3 years confiding in the familiar strangers and not my strange familiars.
I spent 3 years hollow, two of those I lived alone. Alone and more alone than I have ever felt... empty and dead.
Years I broke down, years I built myself back up. Years I made someone of myself that the broken woman I was could cling to in the flood of her emotions.
Years I had to hold up this mask, this pretense.
In those few panicked days I found more of myself than the months of therapy. In the sickening days after, I was unsteady in the face of a winter that looked as barren as I felt.

Three years I fought to bury the truth, but that's the beautiful curse of the truth isn't it; the truth will always come out.
When it came out of the closet, it was one small skeleton with the weight of my shattered world. A skeleton without a single bone, a ghost in every sense; a ghost on small wings.
A ghost on moth wings, craving the light only to perish in the unsteady flame, my flame.

So excuse me when I scream; I finally allowed myself to grieve out loud. Allow me a second to breathe between the unsteady screams in my throat and the stream pouring down my face from my heart.