They say Mayra was born in November—when the wind turns cool, and the sun no longer burns as fiercely. The air softens, leaves begin to fall, and the world slowly tucks itself into silence. That's how she arrived—quietly. No thunder, no drama. Just a small girl wrapped in hospital-white blankets, held tightly in her mother's exhausted arms.
There was joy in the room that day.She was healthy. Pink-cheeked. Her mother's first child.She was named Mayra, a name meaning beloved, admirable.A name full of softness and hope.A name that whispered, this one will be gentle.
And she was.
As a baby, Mayra barely cried. She didn't fuss much. She was easy to handle, people said. "Such a good girl," relatives would praise. But what they called "good" was simply Mayra learning—without knowing—to make herself small. To exist without disturbing anyone. That habit would follow her for years.
She was quiet by nature.Introverted. Observant.She didn't run around shouting or demand attention at birthday parties. She'd sit in a corner, playing silently with a broken toy, content to be unnoticed. People called her "shy," but that wasn't quite it. She didn't fear people; she just didn't trust them to stay.
Even before the world taught her how to hide, she already knew.
As Mayra grew older, her world began to shift. By the time she was eight, her body started to change—and not in the way little girls are taught to expect. She began to gain weight rapidly. Her cheeks puffed up, her arms thickened, her stomach rounded. She noticed the change in the mirror first, but others noticed it in whispers.
"She's getting heavy, isn't she?""Maybe don't give her another roti.""She used to be so cute…"
These weren't always said to her face. But Mayra heard them. Children always do.
At school, she became the punchline.No one said it directly, but she saw it in their glances, in the way they excluded her from games, the way they laughed just a little too loud when she walked past. Her confidence, whatever she had of it, evaporated. She started to shrink inside, even as her body grew outward.
No one noticed. No one asked.She was just the "quiet chubby girl" now.
And then… came something worse.
There was a cousin. Four years older.A boy who everyone trusted—because why wouldn't they? He was family.But his hands betrayed that trust.The touches started small. Quiet. When no one was looking. When Mayra didn't understand what was happening. There were no screams. No warnings. Just confusion. Shame. Silence.
She didn't know what it was.She didn't even have the words.All she knew was that her stomach would twist, her body would freeze, and afterward, she'd feel… strange. Like something dirty had brushed against her soul and left fingerprints.
But she told no one.Because who would believe her?And honestly, she wasn't even sure what she'd be saying.
She learned to carry that silence like a second skin.She learned to sit still and say nothing.And slowly, the world kept moving, as if nothing had happened.As if Mayra wasn't already learning to live with a secret that didn't belong to her.
One night, sometime after, Mayra picked up her father's phone while he slept. It was just curiosity. He had a new phone, and she wanted to play games. She wandered into the gallery by mistake.And that's when she saw it—nudity.Images. Videos. Adult things.
She didn't know what they meant.But her body remembered something similar, something recent, something wrong.It made her feel hollow, as if something had cracked inside her that would never fully heal.She didn't tell anyone.She just closed the phone, placed it gently where she'd found it, and pretended she hadn't seen anything. But she had. And now, the innocence she had left wasn't just broken. It was erased.
In school, things didn't get easier.Until the third grade, Mayra had no real friends.She was always the one sitting alone at the back—drawing stars in her notebook while others played tag and giggled in groups. A girl from her class used to tease her, calling her names, mocking her weight. It stung at first. But eventually, even the cruelty felt like attention.
That same girl later became her first friend.Strange, how loneliness can make you accept anything.Mayra learned to laugh at jokes that hurt, to smile at hands that once pushed her.She wasn't sure if it was real friendship, but it was something.Something was always better than nothing.
Still, she never truly let anyone in.Not fully. Not safely.She learned early that people leave, people lie, and sometimes, people hurt you without even touching you.
She became a shadow of the girl she could've been.A ghost in her own home.A good daughter. A quiet student.A girl who carried too much silence in too small a body.
Sometimes she would lie awake at night, staring at the ceiling, wondering if she was the only one who felt like this. Like a stranger in her own skin. Like a child who grew up too fast, without anyone noticing the cost.
They said she was born loved.And maybe she was.But love, she learned, isn't always loud.Sometimes it fades.Sometimes it fails.And sometimes, it leaves without saying goodbye.
But still—this was her beginning.This was Mayra's first chapter.A chapter written in whispers, in weight, in things left unsaid.
And one day, she would write the rest of the story herself.