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I'm Not Like That
They said,
“I don’t want to be like my parents.”
As if blood were a prophecy.
As if inheritance were a prison sentence
signed in bone.
But lineage is not destiny,
it is unfinished music.
You do not escape your origins
by running in the opposite direction.
You carry them in your marrow,
in the flinch of your shoulders,
in the silence that arrives
when love gets too close.
To become different
you must become braver.
Feel what they swallowed
until it calcified into anger.
Grieve what they renamed “strength.”
Touch the tenderness
they buried beneath survival.
Every family has a ghost language,
don’t talk about it,
don’t cry about it,
don’t need too much.
Break that dialect.
Speak in full sentences of truth.
Let your tears be fluent.
Let your boundaries be loud.
Let your joy be unedited.
You are not here to be a better imitation.
You are here to be an evolution.
The cycle does not shatter
because you rebel.
It shatters because you integrate.
You sit with the ache instead of outsourcing it.
You choose love without control stitched into it.
You parent your own frightened places so your
children do not inherit your unfinished wars.
Becoming more you
than you were ever allowed to be
is a radical act.
It is telling history: you end here.
It is standing in the family tree
like a lightning strike,
not to burn it down, but to split it open
so new branches can find the sun.
