Grace Lives in me by Deborah Usak

 

I once knew a girl who wore silence like a second skin,

Her heart a heavy stone tossed into a nameless river.
She counted cracks in the ceiling at night,
Each one a scar the world never saw.

Her hands were always reaching —
For a love too far,
For a hope too faint,
For a God she was told lived in the sky
But never seemed to answer,

The world called her forgotten.
Her reflection whispered unworthy.
And every sunrise felt like a debt she couldn’t pay —
Another day to survive,
Another tear to swallow.

But grace is a quiet thing,
A thing too thin to see
Yet strong enough to stitch broken souls together.
It did not shout her name from the heavens —
It sat beside her in the dark,
Where no one else dared to go.

Grace did not stop the storm,
But it held her hand through the rain.
It did not erase her scars,
But it wrote love between every wound.

And when she finally lifted her head,
Eyes heavy with a thousand unspoken prayers,
She realized grace had never left —
It had been holding her heart together all along.

So now, when they ask her how she survived,
She simply smiles and says,
"I never did. Grace lives in me.