“Mara and Maya”
Mara learned love from a house with no light,
From hands that were cold and a bed full of night,
From voices that cut, from a mouth full of smoke,
From promises cracked and the women all broke.
She grew where the dirt had been mixed into blood,
Where pain wasn’t pain, it was “life” in the mud,
Where touch wasn’t safe, it was hunger in skin,
So she let all the wolves teach her how to let men in.
She wore lust like a lantern, like maybe it glowed,
But every door opened deeper below,
Every kiss took a piece, every high made it worse,
Every smile was a match, every body a curse.
She said, “If they want me, at least I exist.”
So she lived at the edge of a bottomless pit.
Powder on mirrors, cold stare in the sink,
Mouth full of poison and nothing to think.
Then Maya appeared like a shadow she knew,
Not a girl, not a ghost, but a version cut loose,
The name of the ache, the split in her chest,
The voice in the dark saying, “This is your best.
You are what they made.
You are what they took.
You are just a body with a ruined look.”
And Mara believed it.
Hell loves belief.
It crowns every wound and calls it relief.
So she danced with her death in a motel room haze,
Watched angels go silent in fluorescent gray.
But hell has a sound when the silence gets deep,
A cry from the child underneath all the teeth,
And Maya got closer and said with a grin,
“You don’t want love, Mara. You just want to win.”
That broke something open.
A crack in the lie.
A first honest tear from a life built to hide.
She saw all the men weren’t the mouth of her worth,
Just mirrors of hunger that fed on her hurt.
She saw little Mara still locked in that room,
Still waiting for someone to call her a bloom,
Not a sin, not a game, not a body to spend,
Just a girl who needed one hand that won’t end.
So she turned on Maya, said, “I know who you are.
You’re the mask I created to live through the scar.
You kept me alive, but you don’t get my soul.
You can keep all the ashes. I’m taking control.”
Then hell didn’t vanish—she walked through the flame.
That’s the part they don’t tell you: rebirth hurts the same.
She crawled out of herself, out of shame, out of heat,
With blood on her memory and truth on her teeth.
Now Mara moves quiet, but something is there,
A woman made sharp by surviving despair.
Not innocent—no.
But holy in kind.
A furnace-eyed mother with death left behind.
She learned love ain’t hunger, and touch ain’t a chain,
And being seen naked ain’t healing your pain.
She learned that the girl in the dark still remains—
But now she is held, not abandoned again.
Maya still whispers sometimes in the night,
But Mara just breathes and says, “Not this life.”
Cause she came back burning, not begging to drown—
She went into hell…
and brought her true name out.
Ecksx
