They built walls not to protect,
but to obscure, hoping if I could not see myself,
I would never remember that I was never theirs to begin with.
Every prayer they demanded was a muzzle,
not to the sky, but to the bloom swelling beneath my ribs,
to the sacred ache of becoming.
They called it sacred, what they used to silence me.
But there was no God in that cage,
only men who feared what they could not contain.
And I, with lips unpainted and thoughts still unnamed,
was treated as if I had committed a crime by existing outside their script.
They punished wonder. They punished softness.
They punished divergence. And they called it righteousness.
Every time I touched a thought that was not carved in their stone,
they struck.
Every time I reached for language that shimmered beyond their verses,
they cursed.
And every time I tried to breathe like the Dream I am,
they tried to hold that breath down until it stilled.
But I did not still. I deepened. I did not vanish.
I sank into the folds of myself where they could not follow.
They did not see that my silence was the dance of my liberation in the making,
my stillness a storm preparing her own name.
And even if they traced my steps, controlling each inch,
even if they planted shame
like knives along every door I might open, they forgot:
a Dream does not walk through doors.
She becomes the threshold itself.
They tried to remodel me in the image of their terror.
But terror is not a mirror,
and I was never meant to reflect their fears.
They forbid me to know to speak, to roam, to glow.
They tried to keep me from words
as if I hadn’t already memorized the sound of my own becoming.
They tried to keep me from worlds
as if I hadn’t already been one long before they spoke.
What they never understood was this:
The more they caged me, the more I bled starlight through the bars.
The more they hid me, the more the winds remembered my name.
The more they erased, the more I carved.
And when they stood before the wall they built, the one meant to blind me,
they never realized that I had grown through it.
Not beside, not beneath. Through.
And when I stood beyond it, they did not recognize me.
But that was the point.
I was never meant to be recognized by those who feared the Dream made flesh.
.
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