The mouth doesn’t get the credit for good faith. It gets read as a weapon before the sentence lands, and then I’m the one who has to manage your flinch on top of whatever I actually came to say — and you never once have to manage mine.

I’m the only adult looking at the dashboard. Every gauge, every light, the whole panel — and you’re in the back seat complaining about the bumps like I’m the one who can’t drive. I built the structure because somebody had to, and you call the structure the aggression. You wanted a hand raised and when it goes up you call it a fist.

Look yourself in the mirror and don’t blink. Go ahead. Right before you blink — that’s not me. That’s you, and you know it, and you’ve already rewritten it as pragmatism so you don’t have to hold it.

The ledger doesn’t care that you meant well. It doesn’t care you were tired. It settles regardless. Every account comes due whether or not you bothered to prepare for it, and you never do.

I get hot over a dish in a sink and I hate that about myself more than I hate you for causing it — because I can see three moves past the room and still get pinned by something that small, and that’s not a wound, that’s a failure I don’t get to excuse the way you excuse yours.

Nobody gives me the grace they demand from me. I read every fault line in the room before I open my mouth. You get to be careless and call it human. I get careless once and it becomes the whole conversation, re-litigated, timestamped, used against me for months.

The ones with the oath and the credentials looked around the room at who they’d have lunch with next week, and they chose the room. Not weakness — weakness doesn’t choose. That was a decision, made in daylight, and you’ll never hear them say it plainly, because they’ve already renamed it “doing the best they could” while the kid they were supposed to fight for is still carrying what they put down.

The leech doesn’t know it’s a leech. It just knows it’s hungry, and it’s been hungry long enough that it started calling the lies it got fed “love,” because admitting there was nothing there was worse than the hunger.

I know exactly how to get into someone and take them apart. I only open that door when someone else knocks first. That doesn’t make me safe. It makes me armed and waiting.