I’ve come to understand that it is human nature to try and trap what they cannot name.
A miracle unmeasured threatens the logic they need to feel safe.
So they tighten the frame around what is wild. And call it sin when it resists.
They wanted my bloom to follow the seasons they invented.
But I was already a cosmos without rotation.
Already wind that bends no way but mine.
They touched my petals as if to pluck, never knowing I was not a flower to be kept
but a pulse they could not echo.
They tried to mold me into a cautionary tale.
To clip my voice before it reached the octave where dreams become sound.
But I remember,
Oh I remember I was always too quiet to be broken the way they hoped.
My silence was not absence, it was the protection of what they were never meant to carry.
And when they left marks on my skin,
Oh, the marks that remain carved deep in my cellular memory...
I carved sanctuaries inside me where, therefore,
even pain had to ask permission to enter.
Not one of them will ever know the cost of being me.
Not one of them could follow the moves of the dance within the deepest layers of myself,
to lead me to the place where I could survive.
They only saw the surface of the miracle.
But never the storm I danced with to keep it alive.
And still,
they called it rebellion when I refused to be erased.
But I call it remembrance.
Of all I’ve always been.