For The Child That Needed Shelter

I grew up dreaming of stability.

Not wealth.

Not success.

Just a floor that stayed beneath my feet.

For as long as I remember,

every house I lived in felt haunted.

Not by ghosts,

but by addiction,

neglect,

rage that traveled through walls,

and adults who carried storms inside of them.

I was a child,

learning to read for danger before I learned safety.

I listened for footsteps.

Measured voices.

Studied slammed doors.

Home was never a place.

It was a question.

Would the lights stay on?

Would there be food?

Would today be peaceful,

or would the ground disappear again?

Thirty three years is a long time

to live without a foundation.

Poverty hollowed out the rooms.

Neglect taught me to need less.

Every adult I knew seemed to be surviving

their own disasters,

leaving no shelter for mine.

I grew up on shifting floors,

on promises that collapsed,

on love that arrived with conditions and left without warning.

Even now,

I am still searching for solid ground.

Life has not made the search easy.

Cancer carved its own fault lines through my body.

Loss arrived carrying boxes of new burdens.

Every time I thought I had found stability,

another earthquake seemed to know my address.

And still,

I keep building.

With trembling hands, with borrowed hope, with pieces salvaged from every ruin.

Because somewhere beneath all of this wreckage

is the child who spent years dreaming of a safe place to stand.

A child who believed

there must be a world where floors do not collapse,

where love does not have to be earned,

where rest is not interrupted by fear.

I am trying to build that world now.

Brick by brick.

For the child I was.

For the adult I became.

For the life that has never stopped testing

if I could remain standing.

And for the first time,

the foundation is mine.