The Girl Who Ran

Small hands, big eyes,
A little Black girl in a world too heavy for her bones.
A world that didn’t feel like hers,
A body that didn’t feel like home.
She moved through life like a shadow,
Silent, unseen,
Scared of the darkness that crept into her room at night,
That smelled like liquor and sweat and evil.
She had no words for what happened to her,
No voice to scream,
Only silence,
Only the sound of her breath disappearing into nothing.
Her mother was always working,
Always gone,
And when she was home,
Her hands were full of exhaustion,
Too full to hold the brokenness of her child.
So she became the protector.
A seven-year-old soldier guarding her sisters,
Standing between them and the monster in their house.
But who was there to protect her?
Who was there to see her?
To hear her?
She started blacking out,
Losing time like pages ripped from a book,
Not knowing that in those moments,
God sent an angel to cover her.
To pull her spirit away,
To shield her from the worst of it.
And so she dreamed.
She dreamed of places far,
Of skies wider than her pain,
Of oceans deeper than her silence.
She dreamed so hard that reality became a blur,
And when she spoke,
People said she was lying.
Said she was making things up.
But she wasn’t.
She was running.
Running in her sleep,
Running in her mind,
Running from the hands that broke her,
From the silence that killed her,
From the truth too heavy to carry.
Then one night,
The last attack,
She thought she was dreaming—
But this time, she ran,
And she got away.
But even in freedom, she was still a ghost.
Walking through life, hollow,
Words unspoken,
Family silent,
Trying not to bring it up,
Trying not to remember.
But she remembered.
Every touch, every whisper, every tear she swallowed.
She walked in this world,
Dead inside.

And then, one day,
She met someone—
A woman with eyes like truth,
With a spirit that saw beyond flesh.

And the woman said:
"You were never alone."

She told her every moment she had buried,
Every time she thought she had been forgotten,
Every time she had come close to death,
She had been covered.

God had sent an angel,
Had lifted her spirit when her body couldn’t fight,
Had held her when no one else did.

And she didn’t have to walk through life like a ghost anymore.
Because she was never meant to be invisible.
She was meant to rise.
To stand.
To live.
To know that she was never alone,
And never would be.