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| 𝗩𝗶𝗮 𝗞𝗮𝗿𝗹 𝗔𝗮𝗿𝗼𝗻 𝗚𝗮𝗹𝘃𝗲𝘇, 𝗣𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗿𝗼𝗼𝗺 𝗣𝗛
They flagged my name —
not for falsehood,
not for slander,
but for a punctuation
too deliberate.
They looked at my words —
and saw code.
Not the hours I spent cradling coffee and thought.
Not the midnight metaphors, the bleeding black ink.
Not the stories I chased in broken shoes
across puddled pavements and presscon rooms.
They saw an em dash
and cried: "AI!"
As if language had a barcode.
As if punctuation came with fingerprints.
As if a dash — a simple breath between thought and thought —
was something only steel minds could afford.
Tell me —
have you ever felt the silence between anger and grace?
That pause where truth waits before it bites?
That’s an em dash.
That’s me.
But to them, it was suspicious.
Too clean.
Too sharp.
Too... smart.
They said,
"That’s not how students write."
"That’s not you."
But I’ve lived inside syntax since I was twelve,
writing feelings my mouth could never say.
They saw an em dash —
and called it a machine’s whisper.
But I was there
when that sentence was born
at 3 a.m.,
between the hum of the electric fan
and the weight of a deadline no one else could see.
They don’t know
how many truths I’ve carried in silence,
how many times I’ve stared at a blinking cursor,
watching it blink back like a heartbeat,
as if daring me to feel again.
Because that’s what writing is —
not convenience,
not code,
but blood remembering how to speak.
They don’t know
how I write like I’m praying,
how I chase clarity like a thief in the night.
They looked at my sentence —
saw a dash,
and not the grief it held.
They thought it was artificial
because it was precise.
Because I knew where silence should sit.
AI can mirror rhythm.
It can echo beauty.
But it has never been 16 with a press ID.
I write from rooms
where the ceiling leaks,
where the truth is not a luxury
but a burden we volunteer to carry.
So don’t call my words synthetic
when they’re carved from what I cannot say out loud.
Don’t reduce me to a probability
when I am pain turned into paragraphs.
That em dash?
That was not AI.
That was the pause
between what I lived
and what I survived.
