I wasn’t born with a key in my hand
just callused palms and an empty stomach,
a mom counting coins
like they were prayers she whispered to the sky.
She never finished middle school.
But she taught me how to survive
on broken shoes and secondhand dreams.

MIT kids don’t look like me.
They don’t smell like fryers or dirty rags
after a double shift.
They don’t limp from standing 10 hours
while calculating limits in their heads,
don’t ache in silence
because healthcare is a luxury.
like rest,
like safety,
like time.

I’m mad.
Mad that I have to be brilliant and exhausted,
that I have to be genius and broke.
That I write proofs with one hand
and hold up my world with the other.

They say “work hard and you’ll make it.”
But I’ve worked harder than most will ever know.
And still, I am B’s and bruises,
blisters and brilliance,
screaming in a storm that only I can hear.

But hear this:
For every B I bleed for
is a battle cry against a world
that never wanted me to win.

I may not have a shortcut.
But I will carve greatness out of stone
if that’s what it takes.Because I wasn’t built to quit
I was built to rise
from the kind of place
that never expected anything from me
but silence.