I still remember how they stood, not as strangers, but as blood.
Disguised in the language of what they called family,
they sharpened my childhood into weaponry.
Each memory, each innocent need, turned against me.
They found the softest places in me, the ones I had never shown,
and tried to wound them just enough
that I would never trust my own softness again.
I still don’t know how I bloomed.
I still wonder how I am nothing like them at all.
.
.
.
Some days I ask myself
"how did I survive the cold that kept swallowing the child I was every hour of every year?"
But I did. And I do. And I am.
Even now the echoes try to rise like ghosts in my voice, my skin, my bones.
Even now, a slammed door can make my body tremble like a spell cast
backward into time.
Even now, my breath sometimes searches for permission to exist.
But I do not wait for the world to free me anymore. I never did.
I was the one who broke the seals they carved into me.
I was the one who remembered what they tried to erase.
I am the one rebuilding everything they tried to ruin in silence.
I was never meant to become like them.
And that is no miracle,
it is the unbending truth of who, what I’ve always been.
The sacred center of me, they tried to pierce it.
But even an entire army could not enter what belongs only to me.
And maybe that’s what they feared most.
That I was an ocean they could not conquer.