I carry the weight of faces I never met
but somehow disappoint anyway.
Their inheritance is not wisdom,
not warning,
but a wound that reproduces itself
with each blink.
Some days I cannot tell
if the voice I hear in my own mind is mine
or the echo of someone who decided
long before I existed
that I was already wrong.
I am haunted by emotions
that were not born in me
but learned to thrive in the cracks
where I was supposed to grow.
There is no release.
Only the endless return
to a reflection shaped by hands
that never touched me
yet left fingerprints everywhere.
I wear the eyes of those oppressed by the very face I possess.
My gaze holds the grief of the dispossessed,
yet my skin bears the likeness of the ones
who claimed their bodies, their futures, their breath.
I have been both captor and captive in my own reflection—
a battlefield contained within a single pair of eyes.
History drips from my lashes,
accusation and ache living side by side.
To carry eyes that have learned to despise my face,
to inherit wounds carved by hands that look like mine,
is a curse that echoes through generations—
a conflict stitched into the quiet of my being.
And still, I ask myself:
How can you hate what you do not know,
and who you do not know?
