It’s so easy for them to say
what you should do.
Who to walk away from,
Who to forgive, who not to.

They tell you how you should heal. How you should cope. As if they know. And it’s all said very clearly like an insinuation that implies you aren’t trying or doing enough.

They want you to be over it,
but it still finds you in the quiet hours.
They tell you to push through
things they’ve never had to survive.
They treat your sadness, your grief, your pain
like they should come with a time limit.
They make it seem like weakness.

They don’t like what they don’t understand,
and it shows in the way
they flinch at your truth.

You unsettle them.
Your feelings, your words,
the way you turn your scars into poems.

Your honesty frightens them.
Your light,
your darkness,
the way you still love deeply
after everything.

But you’ve stopped hiding.
You’ve stopped apologizing for things that aren’t your fault.
For feeling too much, most of all.
You know now
this heart of yours,
this wild, open thing,
isn’t a flaw to fix.

Life is too short
to cage what makes you real
and attempt to silence what makes you human.