The Unhinging

If you’ve ever broken yourself into pieces just to survive, I’m bridging doctoral research with raw poetry to help us find our way back to the soul’s original spark.

Part 7 of an ongoing series exploring the quiet architecture of a masked childhood—the scars we curated and the silences we inherited. Follow the story through The Silent Witness collection here ♡

The nuns were right to be unnerved, though they had the wrong reason. They thought I was looking at their souls; I was actually just trying to find something—anything—that was solid.

By second grade, the ground wasn’t the only thing betraying me. It wasn’t just the “clumsy” falls anymore. My body was beginning to unspool in ways that didn’t have names in a Catholic school classroom. It started with the sliding; a sickening, dull pop where a shoulder or an elbow would simply lose its grip on itself.

I’d be reaching for a crayon or pulling on a heavy coat, and suddenly, my arm would become a foreign object. It would hang there, disconnected from the socket, a phantom limb attached to a girl who didn’t know how to scream.

There is a specific kind of horror in a body that refuses to stay put. But I treated my joints like I treated my scabs: with a cold, mechanical detachment. I’d just wait. I’d breathe through the nauseating throb of a bone out of place, watching the nuns from under my lashes, wondering if they could see that I was literally coming apart at the seams.

They didn’t see. They were too busy crossing themselves and telling me to sit up straight.

I became a master of the internal bracing. I learned how to move without shifting, how to walk without jarring the knees that wanted to quit, and how to carry the weight of a dislocating arm as if it were nothing more than a heavy bag of groceries. I was a child-soldier in a war against my own anatomy, and I was winning every battle through sheer, stubborn silence.

I didn’t tell my mother. I didn’t tell the nurse. I just added it to the vault. The elbow slid today. The knee gave way by the swing set. The world is made of shadows and I am made of smoke.

I went through the motions—rinse and repeat—while my skeleton was playing a different game. I was a quiet expert in the art of the hidden catastrophe. I would sit in the pews, the incense stinging my nose, my shoulder hanging by a thread of muscle, and I would look right through the priest.

I wasn’t looking for God. I was looking for the exit.

But the exits in my life were all locked from the outside. And soon, the “daily ritual” of my body breaking was going to collide with the “family weather” at home in a way that no amount of bleach or prayer could fix.

Because the thing about being a silent witness is that eventually, you witness something you can’t just tuck away into a neat, plastic line.

With grit and grace, Brandi Lynn ♡

Enjoyed this piece? Here are two ways to bring this work into your physical space:

• 📚 Hold the Book: My debut prose-poetry collection, Where the Broken Light Falls, is available now on Amazon. [Order the Book Worldwide Here]

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I'm Brandi Lynn. Author, artist, and literacy educator. Welcome to this quiet sanctuary for the outliers, pattern-seekers, and sensory-overloaded. If these words or images found a home in you, I'd love for you to stay.

For more grit, grace, and visual art find me on Instagram — ByBrandiLynn_Art (Art) and ByBrandiLynn (Poetry) or at my website ByBrandiLynn.com