The Boy Who Couldn’t Catch the Words

Our histories cling to us. We are shaped by where we come from.
—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie


I remember trying to read like trying to hold water with my bare hands. The letters wouldn’t stay still. They wiggled and flipped, danced when I stared at them too long, disappeared just as I thought I’d made sense of them. In classrooms full of certainty, I sat in quiet chaos. I wanted to tell someone that the words hurt. Not like knives, but like fog. You walk into them hoping to see and come out feeling smaller.

When they called on me to read aloud, I’d taste metal in my mouth. My voice shrank. My heart raced ahead of every sentence, warning me of what was coming. Failure. Again. The other boys read like their books obeyed them. Mine laughed at me. Every page a puzzle without edges. Every sentence a river I couldn’t cross.

The teachers said I was distracted. Said I should focus. But how do you explain to someone that focusing only makes the letters swim faster? That spelling is a trap, and words are windows with mirrors behind them? That you do care, but caring is not the same as knowing how?

I learned shame before I learned fluency. Learned to memorize rather than read, to guess rather than ask. I grew clever in silence. I built whole worlds in my mind. Wild, beautiful places where no one asked me to spell the word beautiful.

And still, I loved language. Not the way it was taught to me, but the way it lived in me. I found poems in broken lines, found rhythm in the stumble. I became fluent in struggle, and learned to spell resilience by living it, even if I couldn’t write it without checking twice.

Now, I know the name for it: dyslexia. A neurological difference, they say. A lifetime companion. But even before it had a name, it had a shape. A shadow I walked with, a lens through which I saw what others missed. I wasn’t slow. I wasn’t broken. I was translating the world differently.

And I still am.


 
Orphaned

I. The Morning Nobody Woke Me
no one woke me the morning after
the world unparented itself
no slippers scuffed the tiles,
no kettle called my name into the steam.
the sun dragged itself in
without apology.
I sat in my uniform for hours,
waiting for a mouth to say “go.”
even silence had a voice before that.
afterwards, just the ticking of clocks
that didn’t care I hadn’t eaten.
I learned how time forgets you
when no one remembers you exist.

II. Family History: Unknown
they ask if illness runs in the family.
I shrug.
I don’t know if grief counts as genetic.
my mother died when I was fourteen,
my father quit living before I could remember him.
I carry questions like inherited conditions
chronic.
persistent.
undiagnosed.
how do you explain a childhood
built like an unanswered riddle?
do you list abandonment under symptoms?
check the box for “fatigue”
when what you mean is
the kind that starts in the bones of memory?

III. In the Waiting Room of Care
a woman in white asks if I’ve had support.
I laugh and cough at the same time.
support?
like scaffolding?
like hands where there were none?
I say: I had chores, I had neighbors,
I had grief as a full-time babysitter.
I tell her
loneliness doesn’t always cry loudly,
sometimes it just
folds the same shirt three times
because no one taught you how to do laundry.

IV. Night Sweats
I dream in hushed languages.
in one dream my mother holds my head
and hums a tune
I cannot trace
when I wake.
in another, my father
smokes silence.
he offers me a match.
no flame.
I wake up soaked
in a sweat that isn’t fever,
just the memory of never being held
long enough to fall asleep safely.

V. The Doctor Asks Me to Describe the Pain
where does it hurt?
I want to say:
everywhere love should’ve lived.
but I point to my chest
like that’s where it starts.
she nods, writes something down.
undiagnosed.
I’ve gotten good at naming my ache
without sounding dramatic.
there’s no pill for being
a child-shaped hole.
no dosage for what
a lullaby might have prevented.

VI. I Learn to Parent Myself
I buy my first blanket
with coins I earned scrubbing plates.
wrap it around me like a bedtime story
nobody told.
I whisper
“you’re okay”
to my own shaking spine.
I make tea
even though it reminds me of someone
I never had.
I build a home
out of leftovers and soft light.
I brush my own hair.
I say goodnight aloud
just so someone hears it.

VII. What Is Chronic
not the grief,
but the repetition of absence.
the feeling that your name shouts
in a house where no one says it.
not the tragedy,
but how people ask “how are your parents?”
like it’s casual.
like your answer isn’t
a war inside your mouth.
not the loss,
but how long you’ve carried it
without a single clean diagnosis.
chronic means
I never stopped waiting
for someone to come back.

VIII. The Inheritance
what they left me:
no letters,
no instructions,
just a mirror and a mouth.
my reflection is the only
face that never left.
I inherit silence,
the ability to disappear
from photos and prayers.
I inherit resilience
not the kind that wins awards,
but the kind that
just keeps waking up.
every day,
I put my hands
to the pulse of memory
and say:
not today.
not yet.
I’m still here.
 


Scarface

“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”
—Cormac McCarthy

I was born with my name already written on my face. Three lines, carved not in haste but in history — tribal marks, they call them, as if my body was a country I never agreed to govern. My mother says it was tradition. My grandmother says it was protection. The man at the post office says it’s “a shame.”

I say nothing.
Because language breaks down when your face speaks before your mouth does.

As a boy, I’d trace the ridges with my fingers, hoping they’d smooth out like secrets kept too long. But they never faded. They grew louder in classrooms where children learned to whisper slurs in syncopation, their voices a drumbeat of shame. Scarface. Savage. Crayon-face. I learned to hide in corners, in commas, in coats zipped all the way up. I avoided mirrors. And yet, mirrors never avoided me.

Doctors never asked about them. Teachers never understood them. Strangers stared like they were deciphering a map. I wanted to tell them it’s not a roadmap to violence. It’s not war paint. Not punishment. Not poverty. It’s a story I didn’t ask to carry, but one I wear all the same.

Some days it feels like a tattoo I never chose. Other days, like a warning label. But on the rare days, on the days I remember the hands that held me still, the elder who whispered blessings into the blade, the kin who marked me not to shame me, but to name me. I feel almost holy. Like my face carries a language older than ink.

I live now in cities that flinch at scars. They call it “body modification” when it’s white. They call it “barbaric” when it’s me.

But I am not their clean slate.
I am history etched in skin.
I am memory, alive.
I am beautiful, not despite this, but because of it.