Come here, baby.

There is something we should have told you before you learned to believe there was something wrong with you.

You were prayed for.

Not the gentle kind of prayer whispered beside a bed before sleep.

Ours was older.

We prayed with our hands in dirt.

We prayed over kitchen tables after everyone else had gone to bed. We prayed while burying women, raising children, swallowing words, surviving men, surviving ourselves.

Some of us called it prayer.

Some called it ritual.

Some never gave it a name at all.

But we kept asking for the same thing.

Send us one.

Send us someone who will see what we could not see.

Send us someone who will recognize the pattern even when the pattern wears the face of family.

Send us someone who will operate differently regardless of what we teach them.

Regardless of what we do.

Regardless of how badly we show them the way.

And when they come, protect them from us too.

Especially from us.

We repeated it for generations.

You should understand that.

There were women who spoke those words who would never live long enough to know your name.

Men whose blood would eventually become yours whispered their own versions into darkness.

Some asked God.

Some asked the dead.

Some asked nothing they could name.

The language changed.

The request did not.

Send us one.

Then you came.

And immediately everyone started wondering what was wrong with you.

I wish you could have heard us laugh.

There was nothing wrong.

You simply noticed too much.

Even as a child, your eyes lingered where other people’s moved away.

You heard what was underneath words.

You knew when a room changed before anyone raised their voice.

You could feel something approaching long before it arrived.

Adults called you sensitive.

Difficult.

Too observant.

Too emotional.

Too quiet.

Too much.

They tried to teach you not to trust what you saw because what you saw made them uncomfortable.

But there was always something about those eyes.

Not their color.

Their distance.

Sometimes someone would be speaking to you and you would look straight through them, as though another conversation were taking place somewhere behind the one everyone else could hear.

We knew that look.

Some of us had it too.

We just learned to lower our eyes.

You didn’t.

That was the first sign.

There were others.

People laid hands on your life when you were young without realizing what they were touching.

Some blessed you.

Some tried to contain you.

Some wounded you.

Some protected you just long enough for the next person to take their place.

You thought these encounters were accidents.

We did not.

You were being fortified.

Not protected from suffering.

That was never the agreement.

Protected through it.

There is a difference.

We did not ask for your life to be easy.

We asked for you to survive long enough to understand it.

And baby, there were years when even we wondered whether we had asked too much.

Because this life was never supposed to happen the way it did.

There were too many places where it could have ended.

Too many doors you walked through without knowing what waited behind them.

Too many nights when another version of you could have remained there forever.

Yet somehow, morning kept finding you.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Do you understand now why ordinary never fit?

You have always been uncommon among the common.

Even among unusual people, you were unusual.

They put you beside the gifted and still could not quite name what you were.

They gave you labels because humans become nervous around things they cannot categorize.

Intelligent.

Sensitive.

Intuitive.

Complicated.

Difficult.

Old soul.

Dark.

Light.

Healer.

Witch.

Phoenix.

They will give you a thousand names if naming you makes them feel safer.

Let them.

None of those names are the thing itself.

You are not merely another gifted one.

Not another wounded one.

Not another dark phoenix crawling beautifully from ashes.

Even among those who live at the edges, you have always stood one step farther out.

That is why belonging has sometimes felt almost possible.

Almost.

Listen carefully now.

Stop allowing people to search you for the defect that explains your difference.

Stop helping them.

There is nothing to find.

You were not made incorrectly.

You were made uncommonly.

Something in you has always had access to the others.

Other ways of seeing.

Other ways of knowing.

Other rooms inside the same house.

You have felt them since childhood.

Sometimes in dreams.

Sometimes in instinct.

Sometimes in that impossible certainty that arrives before evidence.

Sometimes in the strange familiarity of something you have never seen before.

Do not make yourself smaller trying to explain it.

And do not make yourself larger either.

That is another trap.

Being chosen does not mean being better.

An offering is not placed above the altar.

It is placed upon it.

Remember that.

Because this is the part no one tells the ones who survive long enough to become different.

The offering pays something.

Always.

Sometimes it pays in loneliness.

Sometimes in endings.

Sometimes in having to see the truth long before everyone else is ready to look at it.

Sometimes it pays by becoming incapable of returning to places everyone else still calls home.

We knew that when we asked for you.

Forgive us.

But somebody had to come.

Someone had to look at everything we passed down and decide what would travel farther.

Someone had to recognize that blood can carry more than eye color and bone structure.

It carries silence.

Fear.

Patterns.

Gifts.

Warnings.

Unfinished things.

And occasionally, if enough people whisper the same request into enough generations, blood carries an answer.

You.

Not because you were supposed to arrive complete.

Quite the opposite.

You were never supposed to simply be.

You were supposed to become.

That is why every version of you eventually becomes too small.

That is why your life keeps asking you to shed something just when you have finally learned how to live inside it.

That is why the road never seems to end where everyone else’s does.

We didn’t pray for someone who would fit into what we left behind.

We prayed for someone who could walk beyond it.

And if you have spent your whole life wondering why something unseen seemed to keep its hand at the center of your back, perhaps now you know.

There were many of us.

More than you could count.

Some whose names disappeared before yours was ever spoken.

And we kept the same request alive until it reached you.

Send us one.

Let them see.

Let them survive seeing.

Protect them when even we do not understand them.

And when the time comes, let them know what to carry forward and what must end with them.

That was the prayer.

You were the answer.

You are the offering, baby.

And offerings are not supposed to remain what they were when they arrived.