This body?

Was never a rental.

Never a showroom display

you could test drive with compliments

and return with your fingerprints still on the steering wheel.

‍

This smile?

Didn't bloom from your garden.

It broke pavement,

pushed past concrete laws

and bloomed anyway —

soft like defiance in daylight.

‍

My voice?

Is not a thank-you card

you forgot to open.

It is the apology you owed

but I stopped waiting for.

‍

I buried your gaze

in the backyard with the other artefacts —

names you called me,

versions you preferred.

Obituary reads:

Here lies their opinion of me.

Died quietly

when I stopped asking for it.

‍

I remember the day

I stopped giving myself away

in teaspoons.

Stopped folding my skin

into shapes that fit

the rooms you owned.

I sat in the centre of my own chest

and said,

"Build here."

‍

You never held me,

just held the idea of me

until it felt like ownership.

But let the record say:

Not Yours,

Never Was.

‍

I come from a lineage

of phoenixes,

women who write "survivor"

in the steam of their tea mugs

and still bless the hands that tried to burn them.

I am the knife and the fruit,

the scar and the softness,

the daughter and the storm.

‍

 here I am.

Loud.

Living.

Unapologetically enough.

And finally —

mine.