Generational Trauma
by Priscila Adela
Part I: A Woman Made of Waiting
Many people say war has a sound, but she remembers silence first.
The Silence of bombs
The silence of people falling like flies
As the sky burns red.
She held her daughter’s hand.
Small, warm, alive,
And told herself this was temporary.
Her daughter was eight.
With small hands meant for pencils,
Not for letting go of hers.
But war doesn't ask permission
It takes.
In 1996,
It passed through homes like hunger.
Leaving doors open and names unfinished.
One moment,
a hand in hers.
The next
Nothing.
She became a woman made of waiting.
Years piled inside her chest, heavy as silence.
They said she died of a heart attack.
But her heart had been shattering.
Since the day
She let go
Priscila Adela
Part II: The Life She Survived
At eight, her world split open
Not a fairy tale
No warning
No happy ending.
Just running.
She learned quickly
That survival has a price.
Working in houses that were never her home,
Scrubbing floors that reflected
A life she could not touch.
A child turned servant,
A voice turned quiet,
A dream folded away
Like clothes she never owned.
But hope
Is stubborn.
It lived in her chest
Like a small, unbroken drum,
Beating for the day,
She would find her mother again
And she almost did.
After years,
After hunger,
After surviving what should have ended her
She stood at the edge of that moment.
But life shifted.
I arrived.
And the door closed
Before she could walk through it.
She lost her mother and became one in the same breath.
Priscila Adela
I was not born in war
But war was born in me.
Not in bullets,
But in silence.
Not in fire,
But in a way, love can feel like fear.
I am the eldest daughter,
The bridge between pain and healing,
The one who inherits
What was never meant to be passed down.
I carry stories I did not live,
But they live in my blood.
In the way my mother watches the world,
In a way, her strength feels like armor
She never takes off.
They call it generational trauma.
But I hear echoes
Of pain,
Of loss,
Of life.
Still
I'm here.
Maybe this is where the echo dies.
I take what was broken and choose how it continues.
I choose to end it here.
Priscila Adela