There are the loved and the unloved.
We grow up and become difficult to tell apart.
The unloved learn the manners of belonging.
We bring wine. Remember birthdays.
Know when to laugh.
Inside us, a child keeps watch
with the solemn incompetence of children
entrusted with their own survival.
Everything passes through that child.
A door closing.
A lover turning over in sleep.
The small white silence after a question.
Even beauty must submit to questioning:
How long will you stay?
Who sent you?
What will be required of me afterward?
I have been loved since.
Let the record show it.
There have been good hands,
ordinary mornings in which nobody wanted to hurt me.
I have stood in a kitchen drinking coffee
while my children argued over something wonderfully unimportant.
And felt grief enter through the very door
happiness had opened.
So this was possible.
A childhood could have sounded like this.
Healing has given me a life
in which I can finally comprehend what was taken.
There are losses I could not afford to feel
until I was safe.
God carried me out.
I remember it less as a miracle
than an exhaustion so complete
I could no longer mistake endurance for a home.
His shoulder beneath my face.
My body, still apologizing for its weight.
Behind Him, the whole country of my childhood burning.
I looked back.
Of course I looked back.
Love does not become sensible
because the building is condemned.
I was waiting for a figure at the window.
For someone to stagger into the yard,
blackened, coughing, finally able to say my name
without asking me to become someone else.
Nobody came.
Some were dead.
Some lived comfortably beyond the smoke.
Some would tell you there had never been a house.
And here was God, carrying me toward a life
I had prayed for,
while I watched the road for people
who would never follow.
I wanted Him to turn around.
Even then.
Even knowing.
There is something almost unbearable
about being saved
when you still want to be claimed.
I had imagined deliverance as a reunion.
Someone would find the child.
Someone would kneel.
The truth would make a family of us at last.
Instead, there was distance.
Air.
The terrible freedom of no longer waiting to be let in.
And the understanding:
I would have to live the rest myself.
With God.
With love, when I could bear to receive it.
But with no one who could remember from inside my body,
no witness who could take my place
when the old rooms opened in sleep.
He carried me until I could stand.
Then I stood beside Him,
alive,
with nobody left to go home to.
B🤍
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