Cold

They say the child grows teeth in the cold, learns the language of hunger before words, counts silence as a kind of answer.

No one notices at first how absence settles into the bones, how a hand not held becomes a fist.

In classrooms where help is rationed, where difference is filed as disruption, a girl learns to shrink her voice until it cuts.

A boy is told he is too much too loud, too slow, too wrong so he becomes exactly that, because what else is left when belonging is denied?

We build systems like fences, call them order, call them fairness, watch the most fragile hands bleed trying to climb them.

And still we ask — why the anger? why the fire?

But cold is a teacher that does not soften. It carves. It hollows. It sharpens. It whispers: take warmth, or make it.

So the village trembles at flames it helped to kindle at windows lit not by welcome but by warnings.

This is not about monsters. This is about children we chose not to see.

Because love was inconvenient. Because care was too costly. Because someone said they would grow out of it.

Listen: There is still time to build hearths instead of wildfires.

To widen tables. To rewrite what “support” means so it is not a battle, not a begging bowl, not a mother on her knees trying to prove that her child is worthy of help.

There is still time to choose tenderness before survival turns feral.

But if not do not be surprised when the cold we ignored returns as fire.

And do not call it senseless when it was, all along, a search for warmth.

Photo by M.T ElGassier on Unsplash