This poem began with a short video shared in a parents' group chat. It listed what happens when you give someone something for free, repeatedly: first appreciation, then anticipation, expectation, entitlement, dependency — and finally, when the giving stops, hatred.
The sequence was clean and cautionary. What stayed with me wasn't the warning itself, but something quieter underneath it — the way a gift can look unconditional right up until the moment it isn't.
I didn't want to rewrite the list. I wanted to sit with the moment the leaning becomes visible: the child who receives an allowance the way one receives weather, the star that appears only because the sky has gone dark enough, the heart that keeps time as if by nature until the day it stops. In each case, the condition was always there. It just hadn't been asked to speak yet.