✦ Pack Light, Beloved ✦

They will call you back with trembling tongues,
dressed in guilt and Sunday manners,
telling you your healing is a detour,
that peace is a betrayal,
that silence is safer when shared in suffering.

But you, beloved—
you were not born to inherit their sorrow.
You were not forged for the fortress of familiarity
where joy is rationed,
and envy is passed down like heirlooms.

You were sculpted by storms and sacred rivers.
Your name is freedom spoken in ancestral dialect.
Your bones remember what they were before
they bent under someone else’s burden.

So when they say,
“Go back home,”
know they mean
return to the place where your light was dimmed,
where you learned to apologize for radiance,
where love meant labor and silence meant survival.

But you, beloved,
are not theirs to mold anymore.

You’ve shed the skin of obligation.
You’ve wept on holy floors
and baptized yourself in boundaries.
You’ve learned that peace is not passive—
it is radical,
it is earned,
it is sacred.

Let them speak of you in twisted tales.
Let them rename your joy as betrayal.
Let them feast on their own fiction.

You are no longer available for the weight that isn’t yours.
You are no longer the mule of their unhealed regrets.
You’ve packed light—
truth, breath, clarity, a compass that listens to your soul.

If your absence disturbs the peace,
so be it.
If your flight unsettles their slumber,
let it.

Because your wings were not designed
for their waiting rooms.
Because your calling does not live
in their convenience.

Grieve if you must.
Cry beneath a sky that understands your ache.
But rise anyway.
Walk away anyway.
Heal anyway.

For the journey ahead is not paved in guilt,
but in gold.
And only the unburdened may pass—

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