I Die Every Time I Open My Shell

They say pearls form from pain.

A parasite slips in, maybe sand,

or something artificial shoved into us,

and the body coats it in softness, over and over,

until grief hardens into something people will pay for.

I do not remember when the grain first entered me—

the first comment, the first mirror,

the first time I realised my face had a shape I could hate,

that my body was a reflection others would grade.

I kept telling myself I am a pearl,

but I keep peeling myself open just to check.

What if I am not the round kind?

What if I’m baroque— twisted, uneven,

the kind that doesn’t sit right in necklaces,

the kind that makes designers pause and reconsider the setting?

What if I’m the kind jewelry makers slice open and discard instantly—

not because I lack value,

but because I don’t match what they were trained to look for?

What if the reflection I see, the one with too much curve,

too little elegance, too many shadows… is real?

Everyone who says “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”

are just being kind, are just wrong,

because mirrors do not lie, but I might.

I might be the only one telling the truth

about how monstrous I sometimes feel

in this body, no one else seems to recognise as mine.

They say the oyster dies when the pearl is removed.

Yet still, I offer myself open.

I say, “Here, look— Do you love me now?”

and something in me dies every time I ask that question.

I know I should not bow, but sometimes I do.

To beauty, to hunger; to the eyes that will not see me

unless I am shining the way they were taught to want.

They were taught to want smoothness, to desire perfection.

A muse.

Yet now, I am full of ridges,

wrinkles, and different shades of oats.

I am no muse when my body is covered in flaws,

with skin that won’t stay tight,

with hunger marks I once called discipline,

with all the proof that I once begged to vanish.

They call it self-love, but it feels more like survival.

They say beauty is pain, but no one says it like a warning;

they say it like a promise, like the ache is part of the reward.

I have starved myself in quiet wars,

counted calories like sins.

Now my body engulfs food like comfort,

because torture was never enough to make the pain visible.

Now it asks for shame instead.

Guilt.

Swelling silence.

It wants to feel full, not with food,

but with punishment for daring to take up more space

than what beauty ever allowed me.

I do not eat to feel good.

I eat to remember what I’ve been told I am.

When that wasn’t enough,

I’ve looked at knives the way some girls look at wedding rings—

imagining how they might sculpt me into someone worth protecting.

Roundness becomes a scar I carry in public.

They think wanting to be beautiful is a choice,

but they don’t understand that this is not vanity,

this is my armor, this is the shell building its pearl—

because something foreign slipped in,

and I needed to protect myself from the world

before it gutted me completely.

To stay closed is to suffocate;

To open is to die.

I’ve always lived somewhere in between—

an almost-oyster, an almost-pearl.

I do not know if I am beautiful,

or if I will ever be.

Beauty was never promised to me,

but I know what it costs to try.

Still, I am here.

Layered. Soft. Unyielding.

Alive, and… mine.

Even if no one wears me,

even if no one dares to dive deep enough to find me,

I remain.

Let them look away,

I was never theirs to find anyway.