Destiny — Kevin Tyrone McMillion Jr.

I come from a place where the air itself accuses, a weight so dense it bends the spine of time. Like silver trapped in a furnace with no exit, I am refined, or perhaps merely consumed. Each day I wrestle with a destiny signed by invisible hands, the contract folded into my marrow long before I learned to speak. My mind is both sanctuary and labyrinth, walls pressing inward, corridors that lead me back to the same locked door. Heaven is rumored at the far end, yet the hinges drip with rust, and hell waits in the cracks beneath my feet. I come from a place of the self devouring itself, desire gnawing bone, sweetness offered only to mask the collapse of its own architecture. I was planted in soil that recoiled from life, a seed gasping in dust, until unseen hands tore me out, reburied me in earth that hummed with voices. Even there, I feel the ground shifting, a quiet conspiracy beneath my roots. The wide path was given to me, smooth, bright, endless, a road promising rest but reeking of sleep. Instead I step onto the narrow way, a passage so thin it cuts the soles of my feet. Here destiny is fractured, the script burns but does not vanish. The suffering grows wings, circling above me, yet I continue forward half condemned, half chosen, my body a question the world cannot answer.