They said I was stubborn.
As though stubbornness were a crime punishable by abandonment.
As though fifteen was old enough to understand the weight of a grown man's hands, but too young to deserve someone pulling me out from beneath them.
They said I made my choices.
And perhaps I did.
I chose the boyish promises coming from a man's mouth. I chose the arms I mistook for shelter. I chose what looked like love because nobody had ever taught me that love shouldn't require a child to disappear inside it.
But tell me—
what choice did I have when the people holding my future signed it over to the very hands they should have questioned?
Sixteen years old, and someone handed him the paperwork that made him responsible for the little girl he was already sleeping beside.
Tell me, was that protection?
Was that what safety looked like behind government doors?
A signature. A file closed. Another child no longer their problem.
And when the roof disappeared, when the streets became the only place willing to hold me, where were all those adults who suddenly remembered how difficult I had been?
A year without a home.
A year learning that the world has plenty of space for abandoned children as long as they grow up and stop asking questions.
Now, all these years later, I ask why.
And the answer comes back wearing the same old disguise.
You were stubborn.
You wouldn't have listened.
There was nothing anyone could have done.
Nothing?
Not a phone call? Not a report? Not one adult willing to become the villain in a teenage girl's love story if it meant keeping her safe?
Instead, they remind me how lucky I am that I didn't die.
As though death were the only evidence of a childhood destroyed.
As though the little girl who learned to survive without being protected wasn't buried somewhere beneath the woman who still wakes up carrying her bones.
I look at my own children now.
At their small hands. Their trusting eyes. The way they believe I can keep the monsters on the other side of the door.
And I wonder how anyone could have looked at the girl I was and decided she was old enough to be left with the wolves.
You can call me stubborn.
You can call me difficult.
You can dig through every mistake I made and lay them like dead flowers at my feet.
But you will not make me carry the responsibility that belonged to the adults around me.
I was fifteen.
He was a grown man.
And somewhere, in an office full of paperwork, people who were supposed to protect children forgot that I was one.
So no—
I will not thank you for the fact that I survived.
I should never have needed to survive the people who were supposed to keep me safe.
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