Rat in a Cage

Love feels different when home was never safe

I wasn’t beaten. Not in the way people think when they hear “strict household.”
No belts. No broken bones.
Just a thousand invisible cuts.

Privacy was contraband.
Every door a checkpoint.
Every look a searchlight.
You learn early that walls don’t protect you. They only echo the voices telling you you’re wrong.

Even the closets weren’t mine.
Every closet in the house belonged to my mother.
Even the one in my room.
She’d come in whenever she wanted. To grab something random. To remind me the space wasn’t mine.
I fought for that closet, but it was already too late.
So I moved out. Not because I was ready. Just because I needed one square foot of the world that wasn’t hers.

My father measured everything.
Grades. Posture. The way I chewed.
He wore perfectionism like armor and expected me to wear the same, even if it cut into my skin.
My mother was control disguised as care.
Every “no” was for my own good. Every boundary was hers, never mine.
Together, they turned home into a courtroom where I was always guilty.

People do strange things when they’re judged instead of loved.
You start to police yourself.
You stop crying because tears feel like evidence.
You rehearse smiles that don’t reach your eyes.
You become your own warden. Rattling the cage so no one else has to.

Sometimes when I think of that house, I hear Billy Corgan’s voice.
Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage.
It wasn’t just a lyric. It was prophecy.
Every slammed door, every sigh of disappointment, it was all scored to that song.
Like the universe was in on the joke that I was never getting out clean.

I used to wish they’d laughed instead of yelled.
Said yes instead of no.
Opened the goddamn window instead of locking it.
Because love should feel like breath. Not interrogation.

But I didn’t get breath.
I got silence pressing on my chest until I swore I’d never breathe wrong again.
Nights were the worst. Lying in bed, stiff, listening for the sound of my mother’s footsteps in the hallway.
Every creak of the floorboards. Every squeak of the closet hinge.
Like the house itself was wired to remind me I didn’t belong.

Strict households don’t raise saints.
They raise escape artists.
Kids who carry the lockpick in their smile, the getaway car in their chest.
We learn to break rules just to feel alive.
We learn freedom isn’t given. It’s stolen in pieces.

And if you wonder why I don’t like being told what to do.
If you wonder why I still check over my shoulder in my own apartment.
It’s because I never had a room that was mine.
Never had a “safe.”
Just a closet that never belonged to me.

Sometimes I wonder who I’d be if someone had just let me shut the door.

And maybe that’s why, even now, love feels like a test I’ll fail.
Why I flinch when I want to lean all the way in.
Why in the middle of a good thing, with someone I swear I trust,
some broken part of me is still waiting for the door to swing open
and prove I was never safe to begin with.

I hate that.
I hate that it still owns part of me.

// Scorpio Veil
But I’m still here.
Which means the cage didn’t win.