Being without family
is like falling with no net.

Tightrope walking
with no safety beneath you,
no hands waiting
to catch you when you fall.

It’s terrifying.

Family estrangement
is a particular kind of grief

one without a funeral,
without a body to bury,
without the permission
to say:

I lost them.

Because sometimes
you didn’t lose your family.

You had to leave them.

There is a difference.

Sometimes blood
is not sanctuary.

Sometimes the people
who share your name
are the very people
you must survive.

And sometimes
the most loving thing
you can do for yourself
is walk away
from the Altar
where they keep sacrificing you.

I know what it is
to look behind me
and find no one.

No familiar hands.
No soft place to land.
No chorus of voices
calling me home.

Only the long road
and the sound of my own footsteps
becoming louder
the farther I walked.

And yes, sometimes it is lonely.

Gods, sometimes it is SO fucking lonely.

There are moments
I would give anything
for the kind of family
I should have had.

For a door
I could open without fear.
For love
that did not come with conditions.
For arms
that did not become cages.
For home
that did not require
the surrender of myself.

But I have learned something
on this road:

loneliness is not the same as captivity.

And solitude
is not the same as abandonment.

I would rather walk alone
than be surrounded
by people determined
to make me disappear.

I would rather sleep beneath
an unfamiliar sky
than live beneath a roof
where my existence
requires permission.

I would rather carry
the ache of absence
than carry
the burden of becoming
someone I am not
just to remain loved.

So I cut the cord.

Not because I was heartless.
Because I was alive.
Not because I didn’t love them.
Because I finally learned
that loving someone
does not require
the destruction of myself.

There are some doors
we do not close
out of hatred.

We close them
because there is fire
on the other side.

And sometimes
survival looks like
turning your back
on the people
who taught you
that leaving
would kill you.

Then discovering,
you breathe better
without them.

I walk alone now.

But look at me.

I am walking.
No net.
No safety line.
No one holding
the other end of the rope.

And still
I do not fall.
Because somewhere
between the breaking
and the becoming,
I became my own ground.

My own shelter.
My own witness.
My own home.

They told me
family was everything.

Perhaps.

But I have learned
that self-abandonment
is too high a price
to pay for belonging.

So let them call it estrangement.
Let them call it selfishness.
Let them tell whatever story
allows them to sleep at night.

I know the truth.
I did not abandon my family.
I stopped abandoning myself.

And there is a strange kind of holiness
in that.
A sovereignty
that cannot be inherited
or bestowed.
A freedom
no bloodline can revoke.

I am no longer
waiting for someone
to throw me a rope.

I have become
the Woman
who learned to walk
without one.

And if I must cross
this wilderness alone,
then alone I will go.
Barefoot.
Bloody.
Unbowed.
Free.
Sovereign.

And finally,

mine.

Jaclyn Cherie

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