Why is it that in the same thunder that accuse you recuse your statement simultaneously?
Granting her freedom in the same breath that you once incarcerated her very actions.
The idea that in the midst of the storm we both sought the same shelter and refuge that had no roof for herself.
We both bleed for the same woman who cuts us and then asks us why we are bleeding.
We are marked by the same scar in different bodies.
Your kindness is a lasting testament of love that you continue to bear and love.
But I wonder, what does it feel like to be born from the womb of the woman who constantly grieves you?
The one who results in you putting down your own son as if he was a stranger who had not endured the same things that he felt you feeling and saw unfolding into what we see now.
What do I say? What do I do.
I stand in the echo of that thunder,
where verdicts are delivered before the evidence learns how to breathe.
Where absolution arrives late, carrying the smell of smoke,
asking to be trusted because it sounds like mercy.
She names us home and then evacuates our names from her mouth.
She teaches us the language of love by withdrawing it.
Every embrace is a perimeter,
every silence a law we are expected to obey without reading.
I learned to kneel without prayer.
You learned to stand without ground.
Between us, the woman who made us learned how to survive
by calling survival a virtue and pain a curriculum.
She says, I did my best,
as if best is a destination and not a refusal to turn back.
As if the past did not still wake up sweating inside her,
asking to be forgiven by repeating itself.
You carried her sorrow like a holy object,
polished it with patience, defended it from scrutiny.
I carried the same weight as evidence,
my hands shaking from being told it was mine.
When she cut us, she called it discipline.
When we bled, she called it weakness.
When we named the wound, she called it betrayal.
And still, we loved her, because love was the only thing
we were never punished for holding quietly.
What does it feel like to be born from grief,
to be raised by a lament that never learned how to end?
To look at your own son and see a mirror you cannot bear,
so you shatter it and call the glass a stranger.
I am trying to speak without becoming another storm.
I am trying to act without inheriting her hands.
But every sentence trembles with her weather,
every choice asks whether I will repeat or refuse.
There is no shelter that does not ask one of us to stand outside.
There is no forgiveness that does not cost a body.
There is only this inheritance of scars,
passed down like heirlooms we were never meant to keep.
If love can survive the truth,
then let it bleed honestly.
If it cannot,
let it stop pretending it was never sharp.
