reading room
Lilith
it turns out you weren't a revelation, just a recognition. something I kept circling until the shape stopped pretending it was anything else.
Lilith. the name knows how to sit in my mouth. all soft edges. no explanation required. feminine in the way breathing is. not decorative. not obedient.
people tell stories about you. I recognised the tone before the plot. I already knew what happens when you refuse the position you're handed, when standing beside is mistaken for standing against. the story always calls that defiance. I learned to call it balance.
I wrote you once as a character, years ago. gave you a life because it felt safer to let the truth walk around somewhere fictional. I thought I was inventing you. really, I was rehearsing the act of leaving without calling it escape.
you've been present in the daily things: the constant adjustment, the quiet refusal, the sense that I was never meant to stay where I had to fold myself smaller just to be allowed to remain. not wrong. just mispositioned.
calling myself Lilith now doesn't feel like becoming someone new. it feels like stepping out of a room where I was welcome only as long as I stayed symmetrical to someone else.
there's curiosity here, but it isn't restless. excitement that doesn't beg permission. a calm that comes from realising I can choose departure without it being loss.
so hello. not as an arrival. not as a rebellion. just as a name that understands why leaving the garden was the beginning of honesty.
— Lilith