Baba Yaga The Wise

Child—
I have watched you bow your head to storms
you did not summon.

“I’m sorry,” you whisper
to the rain,
to the wind that tangles your hair,
to the silence of a room that does not know your name.

You apologize
for the way your laughter spills—
wild, uncontained,
like a river that refuses the shape of a man’s map.

Who taught you this soft kneeling?
Who pressed your spirit
into a teacup
and called it womanhood?

I have seen them—
the careful hands of the world—
tucking your thunder
behind your ribs,
wrapping your fire
in lace and expectation,
whispering,
Be smaller.
Be quieter.
Be easier to love.

And you believed them,
as daughters often do.

You learned to fold yourself
like a letter never sent,
to trim your voice
until it fit politely
between breaths,
to apologize
for the simple crime
of existing in full.

“I’m sorry for taking up space.”
“I’m sorry for needing.”
“I’m sorry for being.”

Oh, child—
I have eaten apologies for centuries.
They taste like ash.

There are women
who disappear this way—
not all at once,
but slowly,
like a wick drowning in its own wax.

They become manageable.
Digestible.
Palatable to the system,
to their men,
to the quiet machinery of a life
that never asked them
what they wanted.

They call this survival.

I call it a burial
without a grave.

But listen—
there are others.

Women who wake in the cold hours
with teeth chattering
and something ancient clawing at their throats.

Women who remember—
not with their minds,
but with their bones—
that they were never meant
to be small.

These women
crawl from the cages built of “should”
and “sorry”
and “please forgive me for breathing.”

They tear the lace.
They break the teacup.
They cough up the silence
like a swallowed stone.

And when they speak—
oh, when they speak—

the forest leans in.

But do not mistake this
for an easy resurrection.

Freedom has teeth.

To keep your voice
is to lose the comfort
of being easily held.

To keep your fire
is to walk without shelter
through the long night
of other people’s disappointment.

You will be called too much.
Too loud.
Too wild.
Too unwilling to bend.

Yes—
there is a cost
to remembering yourself.

But there is a greater cost
to forgetting.

So let them keep their small cages
lined with approval.

You—
you belong to the forest,
to the crackling fire,
to the untamed howl
that lives in your chest
and refuses
to apologize.

Say it with me now, child—

Not softly.
Not sweetly.

But with the voice
they tried to bury:

I am not sorry
for the space I take.

I am not sorry
for the storm I carry.

I am not sorry
for being
exactly
what I was made to be.