Do not tell me that there is only certain way I can live my life.

I have spent enough years mistaking cages for homes,
silence was peace, and survival for living.
I refuse to inherit a life that is measured by someone else’s fear.

There is too much of this world waiting to be touched—
too many skies I have yet to stand beneath,
too many versions of myself still waiting to be met.

Do not ask me to make myself smaller
So that you can understand me better
I was not born to become a monument to other people’s expectations.

I want a life that leaves dirt beneath my fingernails, salt on my skin, stories in my bones,
and wonder where certainty once lived.
I want to love without counting the cost.
To leave when my spirit begins to disappear.
To begin again as many times as my soul asks me to.

If I only have this one chance to borrow this body,
then let me spend it until it is no longer borrowed,
let me wear it thin against the world,
let me leave it full of weather, glitter and wonder.

When I am gone,
do not call it tragedy that I died.
Call it tragedy if I ever lived as though I were already buried.
Let the ending be that I spent every borrowed breath becoming myself—
not smaller, not silent,
but alive.