I wrote that line when I was thirteen, in pink ink that bled. My teacher read it aloud, and the class ceremoniously fell silent. No snickers or throat clearing or nervous shuffling. It was an illicit silence. It was lovely. I had named a thing the world hadn’t bothered to name.

Last week, I typed: She let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding. Then I shut my laptop as if I’d caught myself committing plagiarism against the universe. I looked at it with distaste. It was a coffee ring on a white table. It was survivable, something anyone could write. It was cliché and boring.

But it wasn’t always like this.

I used to write flowers with teeth. Suns with migraines. Birds that spoke in the rhythm of bus brakes. My sentences never sat down politely; they rattled the silverware and stomped mud across the freshly cleaned floor.

“You’re tracking in mud!”

People called it strange. Odd. When I was fourteen, a friend pointed to a line: he’d smile like the break of the earth. She said she’d never seen words wear clothes like that. To me, it was simple: he smiled wildly, truthfully, with no forgery. Back then, I didn’t try to be unusual; I simply wrote the way I saw.

The strangeness began in translation. My thoughts were born in the simple, familiar words of my native tongue, and when they crossed the border into English, they emerged distorted—unexpected, even a little luminous like light bent underwater. I didn’t have a vast vocabulary. I had two. And somewhere in the collision, the strangeness was born.

Now that I can speak and write English “properly,” I have lost that collision, that friction. I can find the designated words—and in finding them, I have misplaced my spark.

Somewhere between then and now, I began to sand down the edges. I declawed my own voice. My words no longer bite; they bark half-heartedly, then sit. The change was subtle at first: an essay marked “too much” in red; a contest that rewarded plain, disciplined prose. I read anthologies and thought: Ah. This is what they want. A touch of metaphor, but never enough to make you wonder if the writer thought in similes.

It is a quiet horror to realize you’ve been translated into a plainer version of yourself. I didn’t just lose my way of writing; I misplaced the way I saw. I see in conformity now, straight lines, not in the trembling space between stars. I stopped believing in a world full of winds that could swell with unborn storms and ravenous flowers. I stopped believing I was allowed to name the world in my own dialect of wonder.

This is a refusal. This is a return. This is a line drawn again in pink ink.

I will not write another girl releasing a borrowed sigh she never knew she carried. I will write breaths so heavy they crack glass. Moons that sulk. Rivers that gossip with trees. I will write as if no one will read it—which is to say, I will write as everyone should.

Tonight, the wind is round with possibility, gravid with something I can almost name.

I think it waits for me.