WHAT I WAS

There are truths that don’t announce themselves.

They wait patiently, like everything else did that December.

I thought my silence was discipline.
I thought my stillness was obedience learned from the street.
I thought the way people circled me, discussed me openly, touched me without asking—it was just how the world treated those with no address.

But that was me borrowing human explanations for an animal life.

No one expected me to understand the words being spoken that morning. The laughter. The casual arguments about timing. The instructions passed between hands. They spoke freely because, to them, I was already finished.

That’s the strange thing about being food.

You are spoken about in the past tense while still breathing.

I felt the rope tighten—not painful, just final. I was guided again into position, the way I had been positioned so many times before. Adjusted. Straightened. Someone stepped back to check their work.

There was no anger in the air.

Only focus.

I listened to them discuss Christmas plans over my head. Who would arrive first. Who would eat the most. Whether there would be enough to go around. I realized then that I was part of the math. Not the memory.

When the man stepped forward, I recognized him. He was the one who had pointed at me days ago. His hands were steady. Practiced. This wasn’t his first December.

I understood, finally, why they had fed me well.
Why they had washed me.
Why they had waited.

This wasn’t violence to them.

This was preparation meeting purpose.

I wanted to panic. To thrash. To break the quiet the way my brother had that day on the street. But my body didn’t move the way fear asked it to. Instinct argued with restraint, and restraint won.

In that stillness, clarity settled.

I was not a man misunderstood by the world.
I was not unlucky.
I was not stolen.

I was selected.

A goat.

A good one, apparently.

Someone said something short—maybe a prayer, maybe a signal. I didn’t know. I closed my eyes not because I believed in mercy, but because memory was easier to hold than reality.

I remembered the street.
The heat.
The rain.
Two shapes leaning into each other against the noise.

Then the moment came.

Not loud.
Not dramatic.
Just swift.

The world narrowed to sensation—hands, pressure, a sudden weightlessness I had never felt before. The sounds around me blurred, as if the city itself had stepped back.

And then I was no longer needed.

When the voices returned—lighter now, relieved—I understood the last human truth I would ever borrow:

Christmas had begun.