The Islands Beneath My Skin

I have known women

who left behind

climates I still live inside.

Some left behind the smell of food

from kitchens that disappeared

before I learned I was still hungry.

Some left behind sentences

that still arrive before my own thoughts, 

speak before I do.

Some left behind a silence so precise

I mistook it for peace.

There were women who taught me

that a person can be built from another person's belief.

A few words. A little faith.

A hand resting on a shoulder

at the exact moment the world felt too heavy.

And suddenly,

a boy begins to imagine himself

as something larger

than the name the world had given him.

There were women who taught me

that losing someone is not always absence.

Sometimes, someone remains everywhere.

In songs. In streets. 

In the way you pause before answering.

In habits you never noticed you inherited.

There were women who sat beside me

through ordinary days

and somehow convinced time to move differently.

The kind of miracles you fail to recognise

because miracles are supposed to arrive with thunder.

And there were women who taught me

the lesson I never wanted.

That a person can become a weapon

when another needs a story.

That truth can be stretched 

until it fits the hands holding it.

That sometimes,

someone does not reduce you because they hate you.

Sometimes,

they just need you smaller to make themselves larger.

The strange thing is,

I cannot separate the wounds from the gifts.

The same world that gave me my softest memories

also gave me my sharpest scars.

The same hands that taught me how to hold on

also taught me how easily humans let go.

So I do not write them as angels.

Angels do not disappoint.

I do not write them as demons.

Demons do not leave behind

pieces of themselves

you spend years mistaking for your own.

I write them as I have known them.

Incomplete.

Beautiful in places.

Terrifying in others.

Tender when they still knew how.

Capable of building worlds. 

Capable of burning them.

And perhaps that is the only honest story I can tell.

Not who they were. Not what they did.

But what they left behind after passing through me.