What should I call it?

In a room filled with voices that sound like my name,

I am standing a stranger, playing their game.

They built me a mold out of laughter and pride,

But the person they see is a shadow inside.

I look in the glass for a face I might know,

Searching for roots that were allowed to grow,

Yet the mirror reflects only silence and space,

A drift of cold smoke in an unfamiliar place.

Blood call it home, but the hearth is so cold,

An altar where stories of judgment are told.

To speak my own truth is to speak in a tongue

They cast out as wrong since the day I was young.

I am alien here where I should have belonged,

Always too quiet, or spoken too wrong.

They gather together and call it a tribe,

While I am the hollow they cannot prescribe.

Yet out in the dark, where the winter winds blow,

There are two quiet lanterns that keep me aglow.

Two pairs of hands that don't try to rewrite

The shape of my soul in the midst of the night.

Not a crowd, not a kingdom, just two steady souls

Who don't need me fixed, and don't need me whole—

Who see all my fragments, the fear and the stain,

And stand in the doorway to share in the rain.

I may not know yet who I’m destined to be,

Or what kind of shores are waiting for me,

But as long as those two give me room just to breathe,

I can learn to accept what the world couldn't see.

I don't need the many, the house, or the crown,

When two honest hearts keep me from breaking down.