They tried to sculpt me with their fear,
carve their silhouettes into my flow.
But I was never clay,
I was water.
And water does not keep what does not belong.
They called me wrong for shifting.
For weeping.
For reflecting things they wished to forget.
But I,
I held their sky without asking.
I caught the collapse of their voices without drowning.
I was the stillness they could not touch without trembling.
I was the mirror they could not crack without facing the fracture.
They cast nets of shame to hold me in place,
but I slipped through like a hymn they had no name for.
They told me to harden, but I became mist.
They told me to disappear, but I turned to rain.
And when they struck me, I rippled without breaking.
They never knew, my softness was not a weakness.
It was a choice. A quiet vow older than their violence.
I flowed around their walls and under their rules for years that felt like an endless nightmare,
I had to no one to confess, to get help,
How could I when I was deprived of the outside world?
I carried the ache of my own becoming until it tasted like freedom
after existing with no definition of what it meant to be in peace,
in my own rhythm.
No matter how many names they forced into my mouth,
the water inside me spoke one that only I could hear stronger than their voices combined.
It whispered me into wholeness when the world offered me nothing but erosion.
And so I stayed fluid. Not for them,
But for the girl who needed a shape she could rest inside.
They could not name me. Could not catch me. Could not freeze my heart.
Could not kill the femininity in me.
Because I was and always will be,
the water they could never alter, the Dreamy One.