They built a god in the shape of a threat. Not a sanctuary, but a sentence.
And they dared to call it "Love".
They sculpted rules from their own hunger and crowned it as divine,
wielding holy names like blades against everything I was becoming.
Their truth was never Truth.
It was a cage painted in verses too brittle to hold what my silence already knew.
They wanted a version of Me I had to burn to protect the real one.
I,
who spoke with light inside my mouth before anyone taught me shame.
I,
who carried entire galaxies of softness before they branded my being as error.
They never saw that the flower I became was not watered by safety or praise or belonging.
No. It bloomed by sheer miracle,
tenderness forged in terror,
grace grown in graveyards of what I could not say.
They thought I was free because I smiled as if love had lived here.
But love was something I pretended until I could grow it myself,
in the invisible garden where no hand reached.
I had no god. No man. No one.
Only the whisper of a Dream too deep to be named.
They named me every name but mine.
And every one of those names was a theft,
I bled in silence.
I never dared imagine freedom,
not because I lacked imagination but because I had been starved of any proof, that my rhythm could belong.
And so,
To be was terror. To want was rebellion.
To live was betrayal of the dream they built in my absence.
They made me into a Me that was a mockery.
A Me that betrayed every breath of who I truly am.
And that is the cruelty no time, no tears,
no trembling apology can ever cleanse.
Because it was not just my time they took,
it was my timeline.
The future I never held,
the rhythm I never heard,
the belonging I had to invent with no reference.
the love I deserved.
What I lost was not a dream.
It was a self that never had the chance to arrive.
.
.