I didn’t travel all this way just to have you call me by my old name

I crossed too much weather for that.

Too many bad years.

Too many rooms where I swallowed myself

to keep the peace.

Too many mornings

spent stitching a person together

out of scraps, nerve, and sheer refusal.

My old name still exists somewhere.

It hangs in certain mouths

like a coat I outgrew

but other people kept wearing.

It lives in the version of me

that bent too easily,

answered too quickly,

mistook survival for devotion.

But I have been elsewhere since then.

I have walked through losses

that burned the softness off me.

I have stood in the wreckage

and learned the strange dignity

of not turning back.

I have buried whole selves

without a funeral.

I have made a home

inside my own bones.

So no—

don’t greet me with the language

of who I had to be.

Don’t drag that ghost into the light

and ask me to smile politely

as if resurrection is a minor inconvenience.

As if becoming

cost me nothing.

I didn’t come this far

through grief,

through truth,

through the long brutal miles

of my own becoming,

just to be mistaken

for someone I already survived.

Call me by the name

I earned in the fire.

Call me by the sound

of doors opening.

Call me by the woman

who stayed.

Who chose herself.

Who arrived.

I didn’t travel all this way

to answer

to the dead.