I was only 6 years old. I was only 7 years old. I was only 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 17, 19, 22, 23…

Don’t ask me to forget, forgive, and not be angry at all. Every cell of my body screams hatred for them. Every touch on my skin stimulates pain receptors to the extent that even the brain screams.

I can’t, and I won’t forgive—even the wind that wasn’t gentle on my dark days, even the dust that clung to my body to make fun of me when I was suffering, even the clouds that didn’t roar to give me the space to cry, even the cries that grew loud despite my efforts to muffle them, even the diseases that revealed people’s ugliness, even the time that dilated during my moments of ache, even the world that slowed down to enjoy watching me suffer a little longer, even the destiny that enabled people to stab my heart, dismantle it, disfigure it with such leisure, like a vulture does to a dead body.

I just can’t. I was a kid. I was 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. I was just an infant. I was just a speculation.

I won’t forget when my depression and loneliness were labeled as laziness and an inability to walk with people. I won’t forget when my anxiety was mistaken for rudeness, my silence for arrogance, my hesitation for incompetence. I won’t forget when my sleepless nights, spent wrestling with thoughts I couldn’t silence, were dismissed as irresponsibility.

I won’t forget when my cPTSD was reduced to overreacting, when my violent recoiling at sudden sounds was seen as dramatics, when my inability to trust was mistaken for stubbornness and negativity. I won’t forget when my exhaustion, the kind that seeped into my bones, was called a lack of discipline, when my need for solitude was seen as rejection, when my panic attacks were treated as attention-seeking.

I won’t forget when I had to fake physical illness just to take days off from school—to fight my mental illness and to make it to the next moment. I won’t forget when my struggles were dismissed as bad habits to be fixed, when my wounds were mocked instead of healed, when my pain was invisible because it did not bleed.

I won’t forget when the world expected me to carry it all, yet refused to believe it was heavy.

I didn’t forget back then, and I won’t forget now—because I just can’t. It’s a part of my DNA. I am made of grief, trauma, and pain. I don’t know who I will be if I let it all go. I will be unmade, unalived. So let me be angry. This is my birthright.

I have earned it from the very moment a soul was blown into a mass of flesh inside a womb to call it human. This destiny was shoved into my hands before I was exiled from the heavens into this hellish place below.

I won’t forget, and I won’t forgive.

— Sadia Hakim  // Cosmapoetica Series

Read one of my favorite write-ups, “The implosion of a hollow heart” here.