The Only Sent Letter: Crucified For Knowing

I tested a theory: that love could inspire change. It failed. Foolish hope on one side, reality on the other, and I lost to both. One part of me observed, detached by what I already knew, the other reached and gave them a chance, both parts were stronger than they realized.

I went along with them and their script, not because I believed in them but because I believed in giving chances. I went with the naivety of extending the love and compassion that comes so naturally to me, and I mean it when I say that.

I have faced a resistance in doing better by knowing better and every step I took away was met with resistance so cruel it almost convinced me I was wrong. That I was somehow the devil for even knowing the filth of trickery and vile fraudulence that came anywhere near me.

I was underestimated, assuming my silence was ignorance and my patience a weakness. But in reality, I was never blind, only naive. I simply allowed the truth to unfold at its own pace knowing full well that the moment would come when the scales would tip and their deception would be exposed for what it truly was.

And my love? My love was never a weakness. It was the strength they never understood, the force they tried to break but always the one thing they couldn’t control because it was never meant to be theirs to own.

Since I was younger I knew what I didn’t want. I couldn’t always name what I did want but I felt, deep in my bones what didn’t feel right. What didn’t feel safe. What didn’t feel like love.

And in that knowing, I became a threat. Not because I was loud or rebellious but because I discerned. I saw through smiles that hid daggers. I sensed the tension behind the silence. I questioned what others blindly accepted. I heard the disingenuous vibrations of the vocal chords that spoke deception. In many cases I heard every word unsaid that remained a thought to others, a fly on their wall.

I could smell their intentions in their eyebrows. That subtle twitch of their lies had a scent I could trace before they even opened their mouths.

I could hear the fraudulence in the way they said my name, the truth buried within their tone. My ears picking up on what they meant not what was said. I could hear the choking on their own performance. I could hear the punishment of silence and within the pause before the silent treatment broke their desire spoke beforehand of why they would speak to me again.

I could taste the bitterness behind their offerings. A hidden cost. Their quiet warning. Much like an artificial sweetener, I can taste the trick within my mind to convince me of it's sweetness.

And I felt it in my skin. the way my arms would crawl, the way my stomach would twist when I was expected to hug someone who smiled with their teeth but not their eyes. My body was never fooled.

I was reading the air, the conversion of CO2 to oxygen in the breath between, passed like secrets I was never meant to intercept.

Just a child, but I was already a sensor, a seer. I was the kind of child who made adults uncomfortable, because I couldn’t be deceived, dangerous to those who build their lives on pretending.

So they tried to crush it. Make me doubt what I felt, what I saw, what I knew. But I never unlearned how to read the room like scripture. I never stopped noticing the way energy shifts when truth enters the space.

I was not broken and not difficult. I was not blind.

It was made clear that my healing, my growth, my becoming, was a threat. Not something to be supported, not something to be proud of. But something to mock, to doubt, and to degrade.

I yearned to break the patterns that kept repeating.

They made me feel like my resistance was a flaw, when it was actually the most sacred part of me. My ability to say, “I don’t want this”  and to instinctively recognize harm even when it was dressed up as love was a gift. One they tried to strip from me again and again.

In love, I was punished for being better.

My compassion, the very thing I gave so freely, without expectation, became the weapon used against me. I offered understanding, I gave softness, I stayed even when I should’ve walked. And for that I was broken down. A love that didn’t demand, that didn’t manipulate, that didn’t mirror the chaos of another.

Mistaking my loyalty for weakness. Believing that my forgiveness made me blind. But I saw it all. I felt every betrayal, every moment they tried to chip away at the light in me just to make themselves feel less like the walking atrocity they actually are and pretend not to be.

And when I finally chose myself, when I stepped out of the storm and said no more, they couldn’t handle it. The wrath that came after wasn’t about love. It was about control. It was about envy, the bitter truth that they could not have access to my warmth they once exploited.

Wanting me only as long as my love could be consumed and discarded.

But I stopped being available for their destruction.

And that is where I was made into the villain in their story.

I will never apologize and I do not feel remorse. My heart is not the shameful thing in this story. It’s the miracle.

Because of how I react, the way I freeze, the way I flinch, the way I leave, I’m called unstable.

Because I don't stay and smile through rot, I’m labeled dangerous.

Because I don’t pretend, they call me the problem.

But what I do, what I choose to do in response is fury on a leash.

I burn bridges like they are already ashes with no regret.

I don’t explain myself to people who have already decided I’m wrong before I am given a chance to speak.

I don't wait around to be gaslit into obedience. I throw the match and keep walking.

I am not deceptive. I am not hiding anything behind fake eyes or a forked tongue.

I don’t smile while plotting someone’s downfall.

I don’t play the polite game while gutting someone in private.

What I am is real, and for some people, that’s too fucking much.

Too honest. Too intuitive. Too unwilling to eat shit with a grin and say “thank you.”

I will never apologize for calling out rot in a room full of people pretending they can’t smell it.

And I am not guilty. Not of their projections. Not of their envy. Not of their shame that they tried to mail to my doorstep with my name spelled wrong.

They don’t get to abuse me and then throw a tantrum when I won’t let them anymore.

They don’t get to lie and expect me to be polite about it.

They don’t get to expect loyalty after betrayal.

Their arrogance is nothing but a byproduct of the power they took from me, a privilege they never earned and their confidence is an illusion of the violence they inflicted.

Most importantly, they do not get to live comfortably when their comfort is built on the bones of my suffering and paid with the currency of my pain.

The wise are hunted and punished for their perception, charged with a crime of clarity.

They feared that they could not deceive, what they could not fool, that I know and that I would not pretend.

I hear the insincerity dripping from the syllables of rehearsed stories, meaning lingering in the pause between words, the sound of rustling leaves carries its own note of a hidden message.

I smell tension in the air like the scent of iron before rainfall.

I taste the bitterness of intention on the back of my tongue, the sweetness of anticipation, and the dryness of promise that quenches nothing, leaving me parched as truth is a cold drink of water after a drought.

I feel the texture within the language of touch and the weight of presence presses into my skin like the air itself has a pulse of everything it's ever known.

I see their essence like the patterns of constellations, shimmering like pages in a book yet to be written.

Every sense I possess has converged into a single knowing, a complete clarity of inevitable truth that cannot be distorted.

I tested a theory, that love could inspire change. It failed. But I won’t apologize for believing in something better. I learned that the only thing love could inspire in them was entitlement, a sense of power, and a false sense of security from blood they could spill.

I know it all, but unless I saw it from the very real perspective of every individuals own trials and tribulations, then I would have been failing to see. But now that I see it all, not a single one of them reflects in my eyes as the truth does not blink.

I saw through it all, hoped through it all, and was shown that after all the only thing that mattered to them was how they could admire themselves in the mirror of my agony and admonish the truth.