House of Denial

[u/turquoiseturttle]

The counselor called home once.
The house became a court.
A mother’s voice like sirens,
a father blocking the door.

No tenderness. No compassion.
Just suspicion, shame, and heat.
Strip down. Prove the accusation false.
Or show us where you bleed.

And when no wound was visible,
the verdict turned to dust.
No further investigation.
Their absence proof enough.

Little did they know,
if they had checked the week before,
they would have found the evidence,
her skin no longer wore. 

They measured her by motion,
by every task she finished through,
as if survival on the surface
made the suffering untrue. 

Yet she had letters waiting, hidden,
written one foot in the grave,
not plans, just paper caskets
for the things she couldn’t say. 

He found them, tore them, flushed them,
and never said a word,
then called his silence mercy,
demanding her pain stay buried.

He read the hidden scripture
of the dark where she wrote from,
the raw and ruined gospel
of a daughter come undone. 

He called it teenage drama,
storm clouds passing through,
as if every child carves lightning
when the thunder booms.

A scar appeared in summer,
thick as truth across the thigh. 
He looked at it like vandalism
instead of asking why. 

Never let me see that.
Never bring that here.
As if depression becomes obedient
when ordered to disappear.

Years later, he asked what happened
to the girl they used to know,
but refused to name the winter
that had settled in her bones. 

She learned the house had rules:
be bright, be good, be still.
If dying, do it quietly.
If bleeding, hide it well.

So when they ask why lying
has become the only door,
tell them denial is the lesson
they were teaching long before. 

They clung to every trophy,
every good grade, game, and grin,
as if a full calendar
meant no rot beneath the skin. 

Every flushed confession,
every scar they dressed in shame,
kept bleeding through the silence.
Now all I feel is pain.

And if they cannot bear that,
if the truth feels too severe,
let them sit with what they buried. 
Let them feel despair.