Cosplaying the Victim

They weep like clockwork.
Waterworks on demand.
Always the fainting starlet,
never the villain.
They break people for sport,
then cry when the mirror cracks.

She’s tired of watching the carnage
wrapped in performance art.
Tired of the tantrums that masquerade as pain,
the crocodile tears applied with more precision
than any makeup she’s ever owned.
Tired of truth being rewritten in real time
by someone who’s never known what it feels like
to actually be powerless.

They cosplay the victim
in rooms where they were the storm.
They stumble in,
clutching invisible wounds,
moaning about being misunderstood
while blood still drips from the knives in their hands.

They leave destruction behind—
relationships gutted,
boundaries shredded,
self-worth scorched—
and still manage to be the most injured one in the story.
Every time.

They call her cold.
Call her cruel.
Call her ungrateful.
Because she stopped letting them
steal softness
they never earned.

They say she’s changed.
God, they hate that she’s changed.

What they mean is—
she stopped playing dead.
She stopped holding their grief
while choking on her own.
She stopped feeding the beast
that eats her
then says it’s starving.

And now,
she watches from a safe distance
as they costume themselves in her scars—
twisting her boundaries into betrayal,
her silence into sin,
her escape into abuse.

They want sympathy.
They want applause.
They want to be held
after slapping the hands that reached for them.

They cosplay the victim
because reality would implicate them.
Because introspection is a mirror too clean.
Because if anyone actually looked too closely,
the stitches would show—
threaded with ego,
stuffed with manipulation,
propped up with the bones of everyone
they crushed
to get to the spotlight.

But she sees it now.
Clear as day.

And she’s not clapping anymore.