You Don’t Get To Be Over It

Oh, you’re over it?
Just like that?
Like flipping a switch, like shaking the dust off your hands,
like erasing a name from a list that only you ever had the power to write?

Oh, you’re over it.
How convenient.
Like a storm that passed through a town and never thought twice
about the houses it left in splinters,
the windows shattered, the roof caved in.
Like the wreckage isn’t still there.
Like the people aren’t still crawling from the debris,
breathing in the dust of their own ruin.

Oh, you’re over it.
Tell me, did you wake up one morning,
sip your coffee, stretch your arms,
and think, Damn, I really tormented that kid, but you know what? That was forever ago.
And just like that, it vanished for you?
Like it was a bad dream?
Like it wasn’t real?

But here’s the thing.
Here’s the part you never had to sit with,
because you were never the one sitting in the ruins.

When you move on,
you don’t take the damage with you.
You don’t carry the broken pieces in your hands.
You don’t wake up to the aftershock still rattling in your bones,
to the memories that surface like ghosts in the mirror,
to the feeling that maybe—just maybe—this was all your fault.
You don’t have to rebuild a house you never lived in
after you burned it to the ground.

And yet, you have the audacity to stand there,
arms crossed, smirking, rolling your eyes,
saying, Why are you still talking about this?
Saying, That was years ago, don’t you think it’s time to move on?
Saying, I don’t even remember that happening.

Of course you don’t.
Because for you, it was Tuesday.
For them, it was the beginning of an avalanche.

And now?
Now, you act like their healing is an inconvenience to you.
Like they should have sanded down their scars
so you wouldn’t have to see what you did.
Like they should have scrubbed the story from their skin
so you could walk around clean.
Like their pain is impolite,
like their grief is bad manners,
like their inability to just get over it
is yet another burden on your spotless conscience.

No.
You don’t get to be over it.
You don’t get to decide that the damage stops
just because you’ve stopped looking at it.
You don’t get to shrug off a weight
you never had to carry.
You don’t get to be comfortable
while someone else is still piecing themselves back together
from the wreckage you left behind.

So no, you don’t get to be over it.
Because you were never the one who had to live with it.