Keisha was eight years old when she first realized she was different. Not because she felt different, but because the world told her she was.

It was the first day of third grade. She had braided her hair the night before, sat still as her mother gently oiled her scalp, her fingers weaving love into every strand. She wore the new dress her grandmother had sent from Alabama, yellow like the sun. She felt beautiful. She felt ready.

Then came the moment.

She walked into class, her small hands clutching the straps of her backpack, and felt the shift in the air. It wasn’t loud, not like the jeers she would hear later in life. It was quiet, subtle, the way children glanced at her, then at each other. The way they whispered, as if she couldn’t hear them.

The teacher smiled at her, but it was thin and forced. "Keisha, why don’t you sit in the back?"

The back.

She didn’t argue. She just nodded and walked past rows of children whose eyes told her she was in the wrong place.

She sat alone that day. And the next. And the next.

At recess, she approached a group of girls playing hopscotch. "Can I play?" she asked, her voice small, hopeful.

A blonde girl with pigtails wrinkled her nose. "You can’t jump rope with us. Your hair might—" She stopped, but Keisha knew what she meant.

Her chest burned. "Might what?"

The girl just smirked, and the others giggled. They turned away from her like she was nothing. Like she wasn’t there.

Keisha swallowed the lump in her throat and walked away. She learned that day that silence could hurt more than words.

As she grew older, the wounds deepened.

In middle school, a boy called her "too dark" to be pretty. In high school, a teacher assumed she wasn’t smart enough for advanced classes. At the store, she watched security guards follow her while her white classmates stuffed lip gloss into their pockets without a glance.

She tried to let it roll off her shoulders. Her mother always told her, "Baby, don’t let them see you cry. You’re stronger than that."

But the pain was not water. It did not slide off her skin. It sank into her bones.

Years later, Keisha sat in a meeting room, the only Black woman at the table. She was now Dr. Keisha Adams, a psychologist, a scholar, a woman who had fought for every inch of respect she owned.

But still, when she spoke, they barely listened. Still, when she gave an idea, they nodded, only to repeat it later as if it were their own.

And still, when she walked into certain rooms, she felt eight years old again.

Sitting alone at the back of the class.

Watching girls giggle as they turned their backs on her.

Hearing the unspoken words: You don’t belong here.

Some wounds do not heal. Some ghosts do not fade.

Keisha carried them with her.

Every day.