The Morning I Chose Words Over Despair
Before the first taxi coughed awake on the road, before vendors began turning their hands to bread, banana, and newspaper, before the zinc roofs caught the pale gold of morning, Nia sat in the front yard with her knees pulled to her chest.
The Jamaican air was cool in that small mercy before sunrise. Damp concrete pressed through the thin cotton of her nightdress. Somewhere down the lane, a rooster gave one confused announcement, then stopped as if even he had reconsidered.
In front of her stood the old concrete tank.
It had been in the yard longer than anybody’s patience. Wide, gray, cracked at the edges, abandoned by usefulness, it held a little dirty rainwater, a torn plastic bag, two bottle caps, a rusting spoon, and one slipper nobody claimed. Mosquitoes hovered like they had formed a church committee.
Nia stared into it.
The tank stared back, ugly and quiet.
That morning, she felt just as abandoned.
She was nineteen, maybe twenty depending on which part of her life was speaking. Her school ID said second-year college student. Her bank account said woman with nerves of steel and no business buying lunch. Her notebooks said brilliant. Her body said tired.
Her father had helped with part of her tuition. She was grateful for that, deeply grateful. She did not speak against it. Money was not small. School fees did not care whether your heart was breaking. The bursar’s office did not accept tears as payment, although Nia had considered offering them in installments.
She worked evenings at a small shop near campus, folding work clothes, restocking deodorant, smiling at customers who asked if there was “anything cheaper than this,” while she silently asked God the same question about adulthood.
She counted bus fare like scripture.
One thousand dollars had to stretch. Lunch could wait. Printing could wait. Sleep could wait. Grief, apparently, refused to wait.
That was the part nobody saw.
People saw the bright girl. The one who could answer in class. The one who made lecturers pause because every essay sounded like it had sat down with wisdom and had tea. They heard her talk and laugh and turn any sentence into rhythm.
“You always rhyming, Nia,” her friend Shanice had once told her. “You can’t even be vex normal?”
Nia had laughed then. “Is not my fault frustration have a beat.”
But laughter did not follow her home.
At home, the small room waited with its peeling paint and stacked college notebooks. Old poems hid between lecture notes on Caribbean history, communication theory, and psychology. A black skirt and white blouse hung on a nail, ready for her shift later. Her shoes sat by the door with the tired posture of people who had also been working.
On the chair was an envelope with a reminder about fees.
On the bed was a phone with no missed calls from the people she needed most.
That was the private wound.
Not only the money. Not only the work. Not only the assignments due by midnight, the group members who vanished like duppy when it was time to contribute, the professor who said, “This paper has potential,” as if potential could pay for credit.
It was the ache of trying to become somebody without a strong place to fall.
It was needing comfort and receiving advice.
It was needing presence and receiving silence.
It was being told, “You are strong,” so often that nobody asked whether strength had become too heavy.
The dark inner voice had started whispering weeks before. At first it came like a bad smell, passing through and leaving. Then it learned her schedule. It showed up when she washed her uniform at night. It sat beside her on the bus. It leaned over her shoulder when she studied.
This morning, it was louder.
Give up.
The words did not thunder. They did not need to. They came soft, almost reasonable, like someone offering a chair.
Give up. You tired. Nobody coming. You always have to carry yourself.
Nia pressed her fingers into her arms. She could feel her skin. She could feel the dawn. She could hear a dog barking two yards over, arguing with nothing and winning.
She looked into the dirty water.
“I really out here reasoning with a concrete tank before breakfast,” she whispered.
The sound of her own voice almost startled her.
The tank gave no answer. It only held its junk with great confidence, as if old water and one homeless slipper were a personality.
A small laugh escaped her. It broke halfway and became a sob.
She cried quietly, not because she wanted to be quiet, but because crying loud would require energy she did not have. Her shoulders shook. Her throat burned. Her chest felt packed with stones.
She could not pray the way church people prayed.
She remembered women in white hats at Sunday service, voices lifted, palms open, calling on God like they knew His address by heart. She remembered her grandmother humming one line of a chorus while frying dumpling, the oil popping like percussion. She remembered being small and safe beneath a wooden pew, tracing scratches in the floor while adults sang about victory.
Victory, back then, had sounded like a room full of tambourines.
This morning, victory looked like breathing one more minute.
Nia wiped her face with the heel of her hand.
The voice came again.
You going make it worse if you keep trying. Look how hard survival is.
She closed her eyes.
A thought rose inside her, sudden and sharp enough to interrupt the darkness.
What if I survive this pain but make it worse?
The thought frightened her. Not because it accused her, but because it protected her. It stood up in the middle of the yard like a small auntie with hands on hips.
What if this moment was lying to her?
What if pain was telling the truth about how she felt, but lying about what she deserved?
What if tomorrow was not fixed, but still possible?
She breathed in.
The air smelled of wet dust, ackee leaves, and somebody’s early fire starting nearby. A bus groaned on the main road. The world, rude as ever, kept preparing to continue.
Then another thought came, softer.
Let me write instead.
Nia opened her eyes.
“Write?” she said aloud, as if the thought had poor timing. “Now?”
The tank remained unmoved.
She stood slowly. Her legs tingled. Her nightdress clung to her knees. For a moment she was dizzy, not from drama, but from the plain exhaustion of too many days without enough sleep, enough food, enough gentleness.
She walked back into the house.
Her room was small enough that everything knew everybody. Bed. Chair. Schoolbag. Laundry bucket. Books piled like they were trying to reach heaven. On the wall above the bed was a small palm cross from Easter Sunday, dry and brown now, still holding its shape.
Nia searched under her textbooks.
No paper.
She checked her bag.
Receipts. A crushed sweetie wrapper. A bus ticket. A pen cap with no pen, which felt personal.
She pulled open the drawer of the little wooden table. There, beneath an old program from a youth service and a comb missing teeth, was the notebook.
Its cover was bent. The first pages held poems from when she was sixteen and believed heartbreak was when a boy did not text back. She almost smiled.
“Little girl, you never know invoice was coming for your soul.”
Between two pages, she found a pen.
It was blue. It had bite marks near the top. The ink showed in the tube, but when she scratched it across the paper, nothing came.
Nia stared at it.
“Not you too.”
She shook it. Scribbled in the corner. Blew into it. Rubbed the tip against the paper until a thin, reluctant line appeared.
The pen skipped.
She tried again.
The ink came faint, then stronger, then faint again, like it too needed deliverance.
“Lord, even the pen tired,” she said.
And because she had said Lord, something inside her softened.
Not fixed. Softened.
She sat on the floor, back against the bed, notebook on her knees. The window carried in the first orange thread of morning. Her work clothes waited on the nail. The fee reminder waited on the chair. Her phone waited on the bed, still silent.
Nothing outside had changed.
But something inside had paused.
She wrote the date.
Her hand shook.
She did not know how to begin. The darkness in her mind wanted a speech. It wanted proof that she had lost. It wanted her to agree with every cruel thing loneliness had said.
Nia refused to give it that kind of grammar.
She wrote the first line that came.
God, give me strength to survive what I do not yet understand.
She stopped.
Read it.
The sentence did not make the room glow. No angel tapped the window. No choir rose from the laundry bucket. But her lungs opened a little, as if the line had moved one stone.
She wrote another.
Give me wisdom to learn from this pain without letting it teach me bitterness.
The words began to find their old rhythm. Not pretty rhythm. Necessary rhythm.
Give me courage to forgive what still has a name.
She swallowed.
Some names pressed hard against her chest. People who had left. People who had stayed but felt absent. People who loved her in pieces, when she needed whole arms.
Forgiveness felt too large for morning. Too holy. Too unfair.
She did not write, I forgive them.
She wrote courage.
That was honest.
She kept going.
Give me patience to walk through this season without confusing delay with denial.
That line came stronger.
Give me faith to overcome what keeps trying to outtalk You.
She could hear it now, the voice that had been speaking all morning. It was still there, but it sounded farther away, like somebody shouting from the next lane instead of breathing in her ear.
She wrote another line and scratched it out. Too neat.
She wrote again.
Change my mind, God. Change the path inside me that keeps leading me back to the same pain.
Her tears fell onto the page. The ink blurred where one drop landed, turning the word pain into a blue cloud.
Nia did not wipe it.
Some prayers deserved evidence.
She thought of her father. The envelope of tuition he had helped cover. His tired face the last time she saw him. She thought of how gratitude and hurt could sit at the same table and both be telling the truth.
She thought of her mother, her family, the people whose love had limits they never explained.
She thought of herself at twelve, writing poems on scraps of paper, making rhyme out of everything because rhyme gave life a railing.
Maybe that gift had not left her.
Maybe it had been waiting under the comb with missing teeth.
She wrote until the page filled. Not cleanly. Not with perfect spelling. Not in the kind of handwriting that would impress anybody. This was not an assignment. No lecturer would mark it. No one would write “good insight” in red ink.
This was survival taking dictation.
Line by line, her prayer became a poem.
Line by line, the poem became a rope.
Nia did not climb all the way out. No, that would be too easy a lie. Depression was not frightened off by one notebook page. Bills did not disappear because ink touched paper. Abandonment did not suddenly send an apology with breakfast.
But the morning shifted.
The room was still small, but not airless.
The work clothes still needed ironing, but they no longer looked like a sentence.
The fee reminder stayed on the chair, but it became paper again, not a judge.
Nia stood and washed her face at the basin. The water was cold enough to make her gasp.
“Alright,” she told her reflection in the little mirror. Her eyes were swollen. Her hair leaned in three directions. “We not winning no beauty pageant this morning, but we alive.”
She laughed, a real laugh this time, small and hoarse.
Then she made tea.
No grand breakfast. Just tea and the last slice of hard-dough bread, toasted on one side because the stove was behaving like it had academic probation. She ate slowly. Each bite felt like an agreement.
I am still here.
She put the notebook in her schoolbag.
Not at the bottom, where old things went to die beneath lotion, chargers, and mystery crumbs. She placed it near the top, beside her college notes.
Before leaving, Nia stepped back into the yard.
The sun had risen enough to show the tank clearly. It looked even uglier in daylight. Cracked. Stained. Full of foolishness.
But it no longer looked powerful.
It was just a tank.
She stood before it with her bag on her shoulder and her work shoes in her hand, because she refused to torture her feet before the bus stop.
“You hear me?” she said to it quietly. “I have class.”
The tank said nothing.
That was wise of it.
Nia walked to the gate.
At the corner, Miss Merlene was sweeping her yard in a faded house dress and head tie, moving dust from one location to another with the authority of a general.
“Mawnin, baby,” Miss Merlene called. “You going school?”
“Yes, Miss Merlene.”
“You eat?”
Nia paused. The question almost undid her, because it was so ordinary and so kind.
“Yes, ma’am. Bread and tea.”
Miss Merlene narrowed her eyes. “That is not food. That is suggestion.”
Nia smiled.
Miss Merlene pointed the broom at her. “Come here.”
In three minutes, Nia had a small foil packet in her hand with two fried dumplings and a piece of saltfish. She protested once, weakly, because Caribbean people only respected protest as a ceremonial gesture before feeding you anyway.
“Take it,” Miss Merlene said. “And pass your exam. I need somebody in this lane to write a letter for me when government start act up.”
Nia laughed.
“I can do that.”
As she walked to the bus stop, the morning opened around her. Schoolchildren dragged their feet in uniforms too stiff for the hour. A vendor called out plantain. A taxi driver shouted a destination with holy urgency. Somewhere, church music crackled from a radio, thin but faithful.
Nia touched the notebook through her bag.
She was still tired.
She was still afraid.
There would be phone calls she hoped for and did not receive. There would be fees to negotiate, shifts to work, nights when the old voice tried the door again. Healing would take time. Help would matter. Community would matter. Rest would matter. Some wounds needed prayer, and some needed people who could sit with you until the worst part passed.
But this morning, despair had spoken.
And Nia had answered with a sentence.
At the bus stop, she opened the notebook again. The top of the page was messy with tears and ink. The pen skipped when she uncapped it, just to remind her that deliverance was a process.
She shook it once.
“Behave yourself,” she murmured.
Then she wrote the first words of her survival.
Let me write instead.
Sometimes overcoming does not begin with a shout. Sometimes it begins before breakfast, beside an old concrete tank, when a tired soul refuses to obey despair.
Sometimes the miracle is not that the pain vanishes.
Sometimes the miracle is the interruption.
One thought. One breath. One prayer. One poem. One decision to reach for paper instead of surrender.
The Morning I Chose Words Over Despair is a reminder that relief does not have to look perfect to be real. It can look like swollen eyes, cold water on the face, a pen that barely writes, and a young woman choosing to stay long enough for the next line.
This story was inspired by Prayers by Racquel R. Reece. To continue reading prayers for healing, strength, restoration, and faith through life’s most difficult seasons, purchase the book Prayers by Racquel R. Reece.
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