True Age

(Spoken Word)

Lord knows how old I am.
People count years.
God counts moments.

Earthly time is just that—earthly.
Calendars. Candles. Numbers.
We respect it here, so I’ll respect it too.

But let me tell you how to find your true age.

I was six.

Something happened at six.
Something too big.
Too fast.
Too much.

Author’s Note: I measure my life in the shocks that split the timeline, not the birthdays that tried to cover them. Six was a fault line—what happened there cracked the clock and asked my spirit to start over, older than my body but younger than my fear. If you only count the candles, you’ll miss the nights that never ended, the mornings that remade you; my true age lives in those ruptures, where the story of me had to learn how to breathe again.