The Light Remains Unbroken Inside You

The afternoon sun is bright, but inside the bathroom, the light feels like an interrogation. You are scrubbing at your skin until it is raw, trying to wash off the hate you absorbed from the world today.

The water runs clear, but your arms burn, and the feeling of contamination refuses to rinse away. You think if you just scrub harder, you can remove the stain of what was said to you, what was done to you.

But the dirt is not on your skin. It is in the air you walked through.

There was a woman who bled for twelve years, untouchable, convinced she was unclean. She pushed through the crowd and touched the edge of a robe.

He did not recoil. He did not tell her to go wash.

He turned and called her daughter. The hate you carry is not a stain that makes you unworthy.

It is a weight that was never yours to hold. The light does not ask you to scrub until you bleed.

It asks you to stop. To let the water run over your hands without the friction.

To see that the rawness is the only real thing there, and even that is held. You are not dirty because the world was cruel.

You are the light that walked through the cruelty and remained unbroken.