I Brought Myself Home
I was brought into a home
that should have held me
but the door bruised shut,
and I was given back to the system
like an apology they didn’t mean.
I grew up in case files,
learned love in margins,
timed survival by the clock of abandonment.
I aged out, but the world kept aging me
into a young mother before softness returned,
into a body familiar with harm:
domestic fists, street echoes,
violence with no room to name itself,
touch taken like breath,
and breath still learned to stay.
I have tried to leave this life three times,
and failed each time forward
a proof of survival, not surrender.
Suicide couldn’t hold me,
so I hold myself now;
a survivor with past-tense wounds
and a heartbeat that refused revision.
I am here.
I am alive.
I survived myself,
and everything after that.