What They Tied to My Feet

He came back the way all lost things do,
quietly, without announcing himself,
standing at the courtyard gate where monsoon stains had aged into the walls like old regret.

He thought home would remember him tenderly.
It did not.
It handed him the family name like a sentence,
like a mountain tied to the ankle of a boy
who never learned to swim
but was thrown in anyway
and told it was love.

Every room had an expectation living in it.
Every meal came with a side of what he should become.
How much he should become.
They looked at him and mostly saw
the continuation of their own unfulfilled wants,
and only rarely a child.

So he left.
Kicked his own fragile self out the door,
hoping to be held tenderly somewhere else.
It didn’t hold.
The ghost had already learned his forwarding address.
New faces, the same hands,
pressing down on his shoulders
until he sank into the ground like quicksand.

So he went looking inside himself.
Lit a match in the dark of his own chest.
And found no home.
Only a boy, a shard of that mountain still roped to his ankle,
still flinching at his own voice,
still running the numbers in his head,
am I enough, am I enough, am I enough,
the question worn down until it settled into the groove of a cracked wall.
In every room he had ever stood in,
the cruelest voice was his own.
Built from every disappointed look of his childhood,
every correction, every silence that said
you are not what was needed.
This harsh voice lives in his ribcage now,
and knows all his hiding places.

He stood out in the storm,
hoping the ache of expectation, the bruise of wounded pride, the scald of comparison
would wash out of him.
Then, gathering some courage,
he took the ledger of everyone else’s needs down off his shoulders
and set it in the mud,
Of the mountain, which by now,had worn to grit at his feet;
and did not look back.
It was the first gift he had ever given himself.
Taking it felt selfish.

But in the distance he saw:
not home,
not the warm, certain thing he had wanted,
but light.
At the far end of the tunnel of his hollowed-out self.
Faint. Distant. True.

Freedom.