They built a courtroom
in their memory
and subpoenaed my shadow.
Called every grace to the stand,
cross-examined every sacrifice
until generosity confessed to crimes
it never committed.
I watched history get altered
in real time.
Watched my fingerprints dissolve
from ladders
I held steady with bleeding hands.
Remarkable
how amnesia graduates into authorship.
How dependence changes clothes,
renames itself self-made,
then points back at the bridge
and calls it a cage.
I became the villain
in a film financed by guilt—
my face projected across a screen
I never auditioned for.
And the audience?
Hungry.
Always hungry for simple stories:
Saints.
Sinners.
Monsters.
Anything but the complex arithmetic
of how we hold each other up.
The hardest part was not the accusation.
It was remembering your old laughter
while my name was dragged through gravel.
Mourning a living person.
Attending the funeral of who you used to be.
I tried rescuing the truth,
only to learn that every defense
sounds like a confession
to a jury addicted to spectacle.
So I stopped performing.
Stopped wrestling mirrors.
Stopped applying for citizenship
inside someone else's invention.
Let them keep their scripture.
Let them preach the edited gospel.
Peace is not agreement—
it is refusing to pay rent
inside a house built on fear.
My life is older than their rewrite.
My spirit remembers
what their narrative erased.
When applause abandons the theater,
when ego's heavy makeup
runs beneath the rain,
I still hold the single archive
they can never alter:
the witness within.
The silent ledger.
The unwounded fact.
I know what happened.
And that is enough.