Born for the Throne

I searched above the earth and found no one.

I searched beneath it— among the bones, among the names the soil has learned to keep—

and found no one.

I sent my longing down beneath the sea, where even sunlight forgets its own name.

Nothing.

And at last I understood.

There is none for me.

Perhaps there never was.

Perhaps I was not fashioned for the soft architecture of being kept.

Perhaps some men are not born to be someone's home.

Some men are born to become kingdoms.

I came into this world through the mouth of sorrow.

Sadness was my cradle.

Anger put iron into my bones.

Every wound became a furnace.

Every betrayal laid another stone.

Every hand that let me fall taught my feet how not to kneel.

And all these years I mistook that making for destruction.

I kept trying to become softer.

Kinder.

Smaller.

A man whose heart could be carried without frightening anyone.

I gave pieces of myself away as though love were measured by how little of me remained.

I poured until empty became a personality.

Bled until sacrifice began answering to my name.

And still—

there was none.

None above the earth.

None beneath it.

None beneath the sea.

So perhaps the lesson was never to keep searching.

Perhaps the lesson was to turn around

and meet the man who had been standing behind me all along.

The one I kept trying to silence.

The one forged in rooms where tenderness did not survive.

The one whose hands were made for building what others could not imagine.

The one who looked at ruins

and saw foundations.

I know him now.

I have spent years calling him darkness

because I was afraid of what would happen if I stopped apologizing for his strength.

But darkness is not always evil.

Sometimes darkness is the womb where stars are made.

Sometimes it is the forge.

The deep earth.

The place where pressure turns ordinary things into something that can cut stone.

So today,

I stop running from him.

I stop begging light to make me acceptable.

I embrace the shadow with my face.

Not hatred.

Not cruelty.

Not the smallness of a wounded man trying to wound the world back.

Something older.

Colder.

Disciplined.

The part of me that knows a throne is not given to the man who keeps asking whether he deserves to sit.

I was born from sadness.

Formed in anger.

Tempered in absence.

And perhaps that is why my hands have always reached for things larger than comfort.

I was not born merely to inherit a life.

I was born to forge one.

To build until the ground remembers my footsteps.

To raise empires from every place I was told nothing could grow.

To turn every rejection into architecture.

Every scar into steel.

Every goodbye into another reason to become impossible to ignore.

And if the road toward that man is lonely,

then let it be lonely.

Mountains do not apologize for standing alone.

Oceans do not beg the shore to understand their depth.

And a crown has never asked whether the head beneath it was tired.

So let the old version of me—

the man who gave until he disappeared,

the man who waited at locked doors,

the man who kept placing his heart into hands that could not hold it—

let him sleep.

I do not hate him.

He brought me here.

But he cannot take me where I am going.

Today,

I embrace what I am.

Not abandoned.

Not unwanted.

Not cursed to walk alone.

Forged for it.

There is a difference.

And if no one walks beside me,

then the sound the world hears approaching

will simply be

my footsteps

becoming thunder.