I used to think the light had standards—
that it only found the clean, the brave,
the unbroken.
But I was mistaken.
The light is not a stage light.
It’s not a spotlight.
It’s a match struck in the ribs
of someone who’s crawled through every kind of darkness
and didn’t die in the crawl.
It found me where I collapsed—
back arched over a memory,
mouth stitched shut with silence,
heart like a crime scene.
And still,
it remembered me.
They said I was too damaged to matter,
too loud to be lovable,
too broken to belong.
But my body knew better.
It carried me when I didn’t want to stay.
It held its breath through every "almost."
It buried the bruises in muscle memory
and kept going.
There’s rebellion in breath.
There’s divinity in survival.
There’s poetry in every scar they tried to erase.
I am not what they did to me.
I am what I built from it.
And I didn’t build a cage—I built a cathedral.
Wrecked beams and all.
Cracked stained glass.
Holy in the ruin.
I don’t just shine.
I burn.
Let this be the anthem for the ones still hiding:
The girl who’s silent in a crowded room.
The boy who dissociates at the sound of keys.
The grown woman who flinches in her own kitchen.
The man who was never allowed to cry.
The light remembers you, too.
Even when you forget your own name.
Even when hope feels like a foreign tongue.
Even when all you’ve ever known is shadows.
You are not too late.
Not too far gone.
Not too messy for the miracle.
You are the match.
The smoke.
The fire.
The survival.
You don’t need to be found.
You need to remember—
the light never forgot.