From the beginning I was never quite
the same as those around me.
Daylight felt wrong on my skin, the hum
of ordinary life, a frequency
I could never quite tune myself to.
While others laughed in circles
I never fit, I drafted
quiet maps of all the ways
I stood outside the frame.
I couldn't love the things they loved,
the noise, the feeds, the push and shove
of trending grief and curated joy.
My storms came private. No decoy
of a filtered life could hold
the thing that lived in me, cold
and patient, looking out
through everything I was about.
And from that cloud, that dark persistent
cloud that kept its careful distance
just above my line of sight,
I drew my demons and my light.
A shape that had no name I knew,
yet coloured every world I grew
to see. Not shadow, not quite sun,
the thing that made me come undone,
and made me, too.
