This is not my voice.

This is not my story.
This is hers.

The one who saved me.
Not from death.
From disappearing.

Before you read further, know this:

I once had words.
They left me first.

People waited for my answers.
My mouth opened.
My thoughts arrived on time.
My voice did not.

They called it shyness.
Then slowness.
Then something worse.

Later, sound followed my words into silence.

People say dumb and deaf.
They think the order does not matter.
It does.

Silence did not come all at once.
It learned me slowly.

I am Ariel Sahi.

I write because silence has no witnesses.
My mouth forgot how to testify.

She lived where sound could not reach.
And so I became her witness.

This book is the sound she left inside me.

I call it—

The Unseen Beauty

I was not born broken.

That is important.

I cried like other babies.
My mother says my cry was strong.
Too strong for a small body.

But when I learned words,
they stayed inside me.

I knew what I wanted to say.
I always did.
My tongue simply refused to carry it out.

At five, I learned nodding.
At six, I learned smiling.
At seven, I learned that silence can look like stupidity
to people who have never lived in it.

At eight, sound began to change.

Not disappear.
Distort.

Voices lost edges.
Laughter arrived late.
My name came last, if at all.

I watched mouths more than faces.
Faces more than eyes.
Eyes more than meaning.

I remember my mother calling me for dinner.

Her lips moved.
Her voice should have followed.
It did not.

She waited.
I tried.

Nothing came out.
Nothing came in.

That was the first slap.

Not from her hand.
From the world.

Doctors spoke.
Pens moved.
My parents aged in chairs.

Someone said my mind was sharp.
Someone else said my voice was gone.

Later, they said my hearing would follow.

They were right.

By my teenage years, people stopped waiting.
Expectations are heavy.
Silence made me light.

I became handsome by accident.
That confused people.

They forgive beauty more than silence.
But not much more.

I learned to live small.

I learned how not to be noticed.
How to smile just enough.
How to lower my eyes
before someone finished misunderstanding me.

By twenty, I had mastered invisibility.

That is when she entered my life.

Not like a miracle.
Not like fate.

Like a chair pulled beside me.

But this chapter is not about her yet.

This chapter is about the boy
who survived losing his voice,
then his sound,
long enough
to meet her.

I write now because there are words that cannot be spoken.

I was made for those words.

Not with sound.

With truth.

Turn the page.

She is waiting.

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