The Reclamation of Ms. Hero

Each year, the ritual:

my chosen family gathers

in the soft light of intention,

spinning a single word

to carry the weight

of the next 365 days.

I’ve always nodded.

Never joined.

Not defiance—

just a polite pass.

Fingers curling around nothing,

unable to pin language

to the holes within.

Twenty twenty-five was a knife in my back.

Freed from anesthesia.

Still sinking—

not from self,

but into self,

where self-contempt settled

like a poltergeist,

heavy

and uninvited.

I despised the figure in the mirror—

hollowed eyes,

tremor beneath each step.

Not because I’d forgotten

the weight of my own name,

but because the weight of my own name

had become the problem.

So I went searching for a word—

the way one hunts for a key.

There was peace—

a feather balanced on a blade.

Then confidence—

a lung collapsing mid-breath.

And clarity—

a window iced shut from the inside.

I chose the word wholeness,

and it betrayed me the moment I said it aloud.

It fled on an exhale,

tasting of static—

white noise on the tongue;

vast.

meaningless.

These words were placeholders.

Cardboard saints

I refused to kneel to.

What I’d survived was too vast

for a single syllable,

too jagged for a hymn.

I needed a word

to hold the shape of war,

the slow unraveling

of a kingdom

I never knew I’d surrendered.

Not a word that whispered become—

but one that hissed mine.

A bishop.

Better yet, a king.

A word that whispered checkmate.

This should be simple.

I know words—

often better than I know myself.

I collect the ones that hide,

the ones that name feelings

we didn’t know had language.

Some words are light alone—

but become holy

paired with the right metaphor.

And sometimes,

a single word only works

by the constellation around it—

the kind that strikes,

interrupts,

forces a reckoning.

I will not gamble my year away

on words that cannot tell the truth—

not for participation,

inclusion,

or comfort.

I have lived too long

in the language of bandages—

a house not my own,

a self built of survival’s spare parts,

mistaking the habits of a prisoner

for my native tongue.

I am tired—

tired of being a battlefield

policed by hollow affirmations.

This year, I choose a lexicon of bones.

Reclamation.

Some say hope is oxygen.

I will learn to breathe fire.

I’ll sift the ash

for teeth,

for the marrow of what was stolen.

I won’t fix.

I won’t forge.

I’ll return to the self I loaned to chaos—

interest unpaid,

time limitless,

and pick up the shattered map

of who I was

before the world asked me to break.

Let the world call it an insurrection.

I know better.

It’s a homecoming.