If You’d Left Me Out of It

If you’d left me out of it,
I’d have stayed quiet.
I’d have swallowed the storm and called it mercy,
let the sky bruise over without naming the colour.

But you couldn’t help yourselves—
you lit a match,
and called it truth.
You wrote your lies in ink,
signed your cowardice in cursive,
and smiled as the smoke curled upward,
pretending not to notice the ash on your hands.

You mistook my silence for surrender.
You thought my absence meant you’d won.
But silence is not softness—
it’s the inhale before the verdict,
the patience before the reckoning.

You could have kept me out of it.
You could have stayed small in your pettiness,
unread, unseen, unremembered.
But you wanted an audience.
You wanted me to feel it—
the sting of your falseness,
the thud of your names in rooms I never entered.
So now you will.

Every word you weaponized
will rot back through your teeth.
Every page you filled with poison
will testify against you in time.
And when you look up,
you’ll see the quiet woman you misjudged—
not broken, not begging—
just burning with precision.

Because I don’t fight to be cruel.
I fight to be clear.
And if you had left me out of it,
I might have let you go.
But you invited me into the fire—
and you forgot—
even the fire loves you
until you are ash.

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