I am grateful for the space I left

We are reduced to the dark shadow of circumstance. Buried beneath cloths of tolerance, we mother the ambition of a life to serve. Our mouths are silenced with the prospect of beatings and abandons. We do not have a name, but offer our bodies in chastity to them; the wars suck our breasts with the greediness of man. 

There is a choice, impregnated with sacrifice. You cannot be yours, and thus you must gift yourself still and all. To them or to God. A choice with no possibility of return, burdened by the promise of saving. 

It is by our invalidation that they become noble. It is by our withdrawal that they rise. 

Our mothers taught us, with the scent of their habitual dolour on their skin, the memory of pain. 

We voice our minds out through the swift escapes of poems, the secret begging of our morning prayers. 

I choose not to follow the ones that seek to reverse the stream of surrender. I choose not to follow them that ascend in loneliness to fight for an illusive freedom. We will never be freed. 

I take the choice of purity, of preserving that which is unbroken. 

I am grateful for the space I left. To forgive and be forgiven.