She, with her gentle smile, crafted carefully to hide the storm that raged within.
He, with his quiet strength, a mask worn to protect the brokenness inside.
Both survivors of a pain that had no name, no face, but lingered like a shadow in their hearts.
They told her to endure—because girls are resilient, aren't they?
They told him to be strong—because boys don’t break, do they?
But what they didn’t know was how deep their wounds ran.
How the darkness of night wrapped around them both, suffocating their dreams,
Or how the silence became their companion, as they each learned to carry the burdens of their untold stories alone.
She tucked her tears beneath layers of laughter, her voice fading into whispers no one seemed to hear.
He buried his shame beneath an armor of indifference, pretending that nothing could touch him, even as the weight pressed down harder.
They were different, yet so much the same.
Two souls, marked by trauma, bound by a shared truth: that pain knows no gender.
It doesn’t choose sides; it doesn’t favor one over the other. It simply is.
And in that truth, they found the strength they were never told they had—the strength to speak,
To tell their stories not as a boy or a girl, but as human beings whose hearts had been broken,
Yet who longed for healing in a world that only seemed to look the other way.
Veralyn Chinenye (AKA, Veronica Elias Ugian)
Winner, Poets In Nigeria(PIN), Poetically Written Prose, 2018.
Wawabook Literary Review Fellow, 2019.
