You were a clock that was supposed to stop,
a mechanism wound tight for a shorter spring.
At seventeen, you stood at the edge of the script,
ready for the curtain to fall, for the ink to run dry,
but the sun rose on the eighteenth year,
and the nineteenth, and the twentieth,
like a series of uninvited guests
demanding a room you hadn’t built.
Now, at twenty-three, you wear a tired face
that is less a portrait and more a palimpsest,
scraped thin by the friction of a routine
that feels like a cage of slow, grey glass.
They call it "daily life," but to you, it is a siege.
You are full of a substance that has no name,
not the hollow ache of exhaustion,
nor the soft glow of love,
but a dark, wild pollen, a stubborn green
pushing through the concrete of your obligations.
Your "contumacious" heart is not a defect;
it is the vital organ of your survival.
It is the refusal to be sanded down
by a world that wants you quiet and predictable.
The "potious angles" of your truth,
the sharp, intoxicating edges of who you really are,
have been hiding in the shadows of the "supposed-to-be,"
sharpening themselves against the silence.
What do you do with this rebellion?
You do not try to tame it.
You do not force it into the shape of a career
or a comfortable, smiling morning.
You let it be your compass.
If your hands are tied by the threads of contemplation,
then look at the knots, they are the only things
that prove you are still here, still struggling,
still refusing to be a ghost in your own skin.
The truth is this:
The person who wasn't supposed to see twenty-three
is the only one who can truly see the world.
Your life is not a mistake or a debt;
it is a territory you were never meant to walk,
which makes every step you take
an act of holy trespassing.
Wear the tired face.
Nurture the rebellion.
The world was never ready for you, either,
and that is exactly why you are the only one
who can change the way it breathes.