You Are What You Did (and the Accountability You Refused to Take)

You are not misunderstood.
You are not confused.
You are not “less bad.”
You are not anything
but exactly what you did.

You hit.
You screamed.
You punished with fists
and called it love.
You stripped innocence
from children
like it was yours to take.

And then you had the audacity
to play the bystander—
to shrug,
to spin a narrative
where you were merely there,
never guilty,
just present.

You weren’t present.
You were active.
You were hands.
You were bruises.
You were breathless,
sobbing nights
no one should ever know.

And still, you stand there,
pointing at someone else’s violence
like a shield.
Like a get-out-of-hell card
you wrote yourself.

But you didn’t watch abuse.
You committed it.
With your belt.
With your rage.
With your silence.

You were never collateral damage.
You were never swept up.
You were the storm.
You were the threat.
You were the thing
we tiptoed around.
The fear that lived in the hallway.
The consequence for breathing wrong.

You are not a lesser evil.
You are just more cowardly.
Too weak to admit it.
Too rotten to take the blame.
Too dependent on your excuses
to face the mirror you cracked.

You didn’t fail to protect.
You chose to hurt.
You enjoyed control.
You demanded obedience.
And now you wrap yourself in victimhood
because you know what we know.

You are what you did.

And what you did was evil.

No amount of distance
or time
or revision
will rewrite that.

You are not broken.
You are not damaged.
You are not lost.
You are rotten.

Rotting from the inside out,
clinging to your lies
like they’ll hold you together.

But we see it.
We remember.
And you—
you will be remembered
for exactly what you are.

You are what you did.
And no one
is coming
to save you
from that.

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