You were supposed to protect me.
Instead, you threw me to the wolves.
Not out of hatred.
Not for a wish to watch me suffer.
Just a man fearful of being seen,
So you played the supportive one,
Waving me off with him toward a land not my own,
Like you'd drawn the map of the adventure yourself.I was young, unwary,
Green enough to believe
The hands closest to you
Are the ones least likely to hold the knife.
So I left, your blessing at my back,
That I mistook for wings.
I thought I was walking into love.
I walked into a cage
Dressed as a sanctuary.He measured me in inches,
Asked for smaller, edited, a little less of me.
I gave him less.
He asked again.
There was no smallness
Small enough to fit inside his hands.
He wrapped me in his finest silk,
Bound my edges with a hand so gentle
The world saw an adornment.
I felt a tourniquet closing on my chest.When I said, "This hurts,"
He turned my own wound
Into a blade pointed back at my chest —
Called my pain the proof of how I wounded him.
It wasn't that he didn't love me.
It's that his love, like yours, father,
Only opened its heart
For a version of me
I didn't recognize in the mirror.Some girls get eaten by wolves.
Some learn the taste of their own blood
And become the pack.
I thought I was being devoured.
God herself was only carving me hollow
To fill me with something stronger.The girl with dreams still burning behind her eyes —
She died there, quietly, the way embers do.
From her ashes rose the one
The wolves now answer to.I don't know if I owe you
My anger or my gratitude, father.
Maybe both can sit at the same table.
Grief, for the girl I lost.
Reverence, for the woman
Who walked out of that fire.Maybe it was never my innocence
You were sent to guard.
Maybe it was always this —
The sovereignty that needed burning to be born.