heres a poem i made called "the cross on the door". They painted a red cross on our door long before I knew its name, a quiet mark that said someone inside is sick, though no fever burned in me. I learned early how a house can be sealed without boards, without nails. just the weight of voices that crack like splintering beams and footsteps that thunder like carts carrying the dead away. “Lord, have mercy upon us,” I whispered it the way the old plague houses did, not as a prayer, but as a warning to anyone passing by: Do not enter. There is illness here that spreads without touch. I was the healthy one, the child who tried to breathe clean air in rooms thick with storms I didn’t cause. Still, the door stayed shut. They said forty days, but inside it felt like forty years— a lifetime measured in echoes, in the slow drip of hours that refused to move. Our pastor said once, with the soft certainty of someone who has never lived behind a sealed door— that God places the healthy among the sick to save a million others. That my suffering was a lantern, a future testimony, a burden meant to bloom into purpose. But I never agreed. I never asked to be the offering. I never wanted my childhood to be a sermon or my bruised quiet to be anyone’s lesson. I only wanted the door unsealed, the cross washed away, the chance to grow in a house where health wasn’t a miracle but a given. Still, I carry the memory of that mark— red as warning, red as truth, red as the line I draw now between their sickness and my self. I was trapped inside with the ill, but I was never one of them. And stepping into the world, I learned the greatest mercy is knowing the plague was never mine to keep.