They didn't give me a name.
Not a real one.
Names are for people who are allowed to exist on their own.
I learned that the morning I heard it said out loud for the first time.
"Jesus shouldn't see this," a woman whispered behind me.
I stopped walking.
The square went quiet in the way it always did—like the air itself was waiting for permission to move.
An elder cleared his throat. "Mind your tongue," he said gently. "He hears everything."
She bowed her head, embarrassed. Afraid.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean—"
"It's fine," the elder interrupted. He looked at me, smiling. "He forgives."
That was how they did it.
Never to my face. Always just out of reach. Like a prayer spoken about you instead of to you.
Jesus.
They said it when they thought I couldn't hear. When they argued. When they planned.
"He hasn't performed a sign yet."
"He will."
"He must."
I didn't know who Jesus was back then—not properly. Only that whenever they said the name, their voices changed. Softer. Hungrier.
By thirteen, the hunger outweighed the patience.
They started waking me before dawn.
"Come," an elder said one morning, hand already on my shoulder. "Today matters."
They led me beyond the town, to the edge where the ground rose and the trees thinned. A place I had only seen from far away.
Wood lay stacked there. Rough. Heavy.
"What is this?" I asked.
"A lesson," another elder replied.
They placed the beam across my shoulders. It was heavier than anything I'd carried before. The weight dug into my skin.
"Walk," someone said.
I did.
Each step drew eyes. Not pity. Not concern.
Expectation.
"Endure," they murmured as I passed.
I stumbled once. Hands grabbed me—not to help, but to steady the wood.
"Again," an elder whispered urgently. "Don't make this messy."
That was when it clicked.
Not fully. Not all at once.
But enough.
That night, I asked my mother, "What happens at the end?"
Her hands froze mid-motion.
"End of what?" she asked.
"The lessons."
Silence stretched between us. Long enough to hurt.
"They'll know," she said finally. "For sure."
"Know what?"
That was when she cried.
Not loudly. Not like grief.
Like guilt.
I didn't sleep that night.
Before sunrise, they came.
Not shouting. Not forcing.
They didn't need to.
Hands guided me. Voices prayed. Someone tied my wrists—not tightly, not yet.
"Trust," an elder said, eyes bright. "This is necessary."
Necessary for what?
I looked at their faces then. Really looked.
These weren't zealots.
They were afraid people clinging to certainty so hard they were willing to kill for it.
That was when I ran.
I don't remember breaking free. I remember pain. Shouting. Someone screaming my name—his name.
"Jesus!"
I ran until the town disappeared behind the trees.
Branches tore at my skin. Blood soaked into borrowed clothes. My chest burned like it was splitting apart.
I didn't stop.
Not until I collapsed among roots and leaves, the world spinning, my breath coming shallow and wrong.
As I lay there, bleeding and shaking, one thought kept repeating in my head.
They weren't trying to test me.
They were trying to finish the story.
And I refused to be their ending.