What I Would Say If I Could Find You Poem by Lilith Van'Nightinveil

If I could find you—
small enough to still believe
love might come without conditions,
quiet enough to think
silence was safety—
I would kneel beside you
and start with this:

I'm sorry
you were handed a war
and told to call it childhood.

Sorry the world taught you
that survival meant damage,
that staying alive required sacrifice,
and that the body was the first thing
you were allowed to punish.

You learned early
how to turn pain inward
because it was the only pain
you could control.

You learned a secret language—
etched in skin, held in breath,
spoken only by those
who knew how unbearable it was
to exist unseen.

What you did to yourself
was not a wish to die.
It was a desperate devotion to living
in a world that offered no shelter.

You wanted love
that didn't come with rules.
Acceptance without scrutiny.
A room where you could breathe
without counting footsteps,
without reading moods,
without walking on eggshells
that cut no matter how careful you were.

You wanted to exist
without being punished for it.

I know why you blamed yourself.
It hurt less than believing
the people meant to protect you
never did.
I know why hunger became sacred,
why numbness felt like mercy,
why self-hatred became armor—
sharp enough to keep worse things away.

None of that makes you broken.
None of that makes you cruel to yourself.
It makes you a child
who learned survival
before softness ever arrived.

You were not reckless.
You were strategic.
You were not weak.
You were cornered,
Like a feral animal.

I wish someone had told you
that coping is not consent,
that harm does not mean desire,
that choosing less pain
when peace was unavailable
is still choosing life.

If I could take your hands now,
I wouldn't ask you to forgive yourself.
I would say-

Thank you
for staying.
Thank you for carrying us
through nights that tried to erase you.
Thank you for speaking a language
no one taught you
because silence would have killed you faster.

You deserved a childhood.
You deserved gentleness.
You deserved love that didn't demand proof.

And even though you never got that chance,
you survived the war.
Not untouched.
Not unscarred.
But still here.

I am standing in this life
because you refused to disappear.
And I will spend the rest of it
learning how to give you
what you were never given—
a place to rest,
a body that is not an enemy,
and love
without conditions.