The Cage

Nineteen years. Nineteen years of holding the scales, chasing the grails, paying the tax of a life measured in sweat and bone. I cooked my own meals at eight years old, so don't talk to me about "hustle." Don't talk to me about "drive." I drove myself straight into a wall made of my own skeleton.

And now? Now, ten minutes of a dishes-and-counters chore is a transaction. A transaction that costs me three days of gravity. The doctors write prescriptions with hollow words, "Take a walk," they say, as if the sidewalk isn't an ocean I am drowning in. "You're just depressed," they say, because it’s easier to diagnose a broken spirit than a broken cell.

But listen to the silence of this bedroom. It’s not empty. It’s crowded with the ghost of who I was, and the heavy, stubborn truth of who I am. The bills can stack up to the ceiling. My mother's voice can echo through the drywall. But I am stripping off the guilt they taught me to wear like clothes.

I am not the cage. I am the one surviving inside it. Without the flame, I am still the fire.