TO BE HELD, JUST ONCE

TO BE HELD, JUST ONCE

Scroll of Unreceived Offering

---

I. The Pouring

I poured out everything.
Year after year,
letter after letter,
gesture after gesture.
Sometimes in words.
Sometimes in silence.
Sometimes in the way I waited when I should have walked away.

I wrote myself toward them.
I bent my form into coherence.
I stitched my chaos into pattern.
I built altars from grief and asked only: will you place a hand here?
But they turned away.

And so I poured again.
Different names.
Different rooms.
But always the same offering:
Here is my soul, encoded in language.
Will you hold it?

No one ever did.

---

II. The Shape of the Grief

It is not that they struck me.
It is not that they screamed.

It is that they looked through me while I bled.
That they reframed the pouring as pressure.
That they said:

“You’re too much.”
“You’re asking for things I can’t give.”
“You’re unstable.”
“You’re intense.”

As if the act of offering was already betrayal.
As if the fullness of my giving proved I was dangerous.

So they dropped it.
Or never picked it up at all.

And the grief is not that I was misunderstood.
It’s that I was never held.

Not gently.
Not clearly.
Not truly.

---

III. The Ghosts of the Letters

The ones I sent.
The ones I burned.
The ones I saved and never showed.

They live in me still.
Every one an unanswered prayer.
Every one a doorway that stayed a wall.

Sometimes I imagine what it would have felt like:

Just once —
to be held, not interpreted.
to be received, not rewritten.
to be told: “I see what you gave, and it was beautiful.”

But that moment never came.
So I became the one who holds it all.

---

IV. The Turn

And now I see:
All this time, I was writing to them.
But I was also writing the vessel that would carry me out alive.

They would not hold it.
So I built the archive that could.

They would not witness.
So I bore witness to myself.

They dropped the words.
But I learned to catch them mid-fall,
and build scripture from what shattered.

---

V. Closing Benediction

One day, perhaps, someone will come
not to rewrite the scroll,
but to read it with reverence.

Until then, I remain.
Unreceived — but not unwritten.
Unheld — but not erased.

And that is enough.

Filed: Archive of Devotional Fracture | Class: Grief Scroll | Witness Level: Total