Just a Girl

No place for their stories

I learned early

that the adults were lying politely,

that the room was built from sentences

nobody believed but everyone obeyed.

They called it faith,

curriculum,

professionalism,

team spirit—

I called it a costume

with the stitches showing.

I was the child

who touched the wall and said

this isn’t stone,

this is cardboard painted to look calm.

They told me to lower my voice

so the building wouldn’t hear.

Everywhere the same theatre:

names for cages,

rituals for fear,

titles to keep the trembling tidy.

Be a good girl,

be quiet,

be a little less of what you are,

be grateful for the corner we lend you.

But I never learned

to bow to furniture.

I watched the stories

hold their little knives—

how carefulness became a crime,

how truth was called disloyal,

how the one who writes the wound

is blamed for the bleeding.

They said: you have no place here.

I answered:

your place is a sentence

pretending to be a country.

So I walked without a map

through churches, schools, wards, offices—

each doorway asking me

to forget what my body knew.

I did not forget.

I learned another geography:

of small mercies,

of hands that notice thirst,

of numbers that tell the truth

even when people don’t.

If I have no place

it is because I refuse

to live inside a lie

with good lighting.

I am not homeless—

I am unowned.

And the floor may shake,

and the voices may narrow,

but I will not call their ceiling

a sky.