a letter from gregor samsa

an ode to metamorphosis

I never fit in — not with them, not within myself.

But no, I didn’t hate them.

I simply believed I wasn’t worthy of anything better.

I just believed love was something you had to earn.

And the moment I could no longer provide, I stopped feeling worthy of love at all.

Was I wrong to think that?

Was there a better ending waiting, had I only asked for it?

Would someone have opened a door if I'd knocked, instead of hiding behind it?

People read my story now with trembling sympathy.

"Poor Gregor," they whisper.

But I wonder - do they read between the lines?

Do they feel what it's like to be a stranger in your own skin,

to be too monstrous for the world you knew, yet still too human to fully let go?

No one tells you how violence can be quiet,

How exile can occur within the walls of your own home,

How death can unfold not in one final blow,

But in the dull repetition of being unwanted.

They say I deserved more.

But perhaps this — this erasure, this silence — was the only resolution that ever felt honest.

I longed for it.

Not out of despair,

But out of a strange, exhausted clarity:

I had become something they could not name, and therefore could not keep.

Should I have hurled myself through the window into some unknown dawn?

Should I have fought to reclaim whatever remained of my humanity?

Perhaps.

But I stayed.

Because I mistook endurance for loyalty.

Because I believed suffering was penance.

Because I could not imagine a world that would hold me gently in this shape.

And so I receded, inch by inch —

not with rage, but with resignation.

I did not perish from metamorphosis.

I perished from the weight of being unrecognizable.

And that is the tragedy no one speaks aloud:

I did not die because I changed.

I died because I was not allowed to.

Yours Truly,

Gregor Samsa.