POEM: I’m Making Strangers

I’m Making Strangers

I thought I had to prove
that I was solid,
that I was bright enough,
that I could carry more
without bending.

I broke.
Not from them.
From me.

Ice in fire.
Fire in ice.
A volcano not yet born
to be a mountain.

I mistook endurance
for worth.

In rooms built on hierarchy and noise,
I made myself fluent
in over-explaining,
in anticipating,
in bracing,
in painting brass
what was already gold.

I thought survival
meant shining harder.

But the systems were never mirrors.
They were machines.
They measured compliance,
not depth.
Output,
not pulse.

I kept offering pulse.
Heartbeats.

No wonder I was tired.

They aborted my heart.

Now I see it plainly—
not as betrayal,
not as tragedy,
but as release.

They did not belong to me.
I absolutely did not belong to them.

They did not know how to hold
what I was bringing.

And I do not need to teach them.

I can step sideways
out of the machinery,
out of the proving,
out of the smallness of being assessed.
Erased.

There is a current beneath all of that.

Taking them away.
Taking me forward.

I feel it now.

It does not ask me to argue.
It does not ask me to harden.
It does not even ask me to win—
because when someone wins, someone loses,
and I want everyone to rise.
I want everyone’s ease.

It asks me to float.

To let the rooms that cannot see me
blur behind my shoulder.

I’m dancing again.

To keep my weight
in my own center—
until it isn’t weight at all,
but a spinning top,
a spinning dervish.

To build
what feels like rhythm.
Jazz.

To store what matters.
Bluegrass.

To soften where I rest.
Country folk.

To move toward what warms.
Synergy.
House music.

I am not escaping.
I am softening.
I am redirecting
to my true north.

I am not diminished.
I’m expanding.

I am done proving.

Their loss.
I’m sorry.

And the water,
at last,
is carrying me.