I’ve seen your kind of mercy,
and it’s got teeth.
You said you’ve broken stronger women than me.
What a line to throw at someone still standing-
someone still holding your words like a knife
they haven’t decided to drop.

What a way to remind me
that you’ve already decided how this ends—
with me on my knees,
and you walking away,
your hands clean but your mouth ******
from everything you’ve said,
apologized for,
then said again.

I hate that you asked me to tell you
two opposing views I hold.
Did you realize you are one of them?

We laugh like it’s nothing,
like we haven’t spent years
cutting each other open
and calling it something softer.

You still picture it—
me, maybe, or just us in the abstract—
and I still think about how it feels
to be reduced to skin and nothing more.
Like flesh is the only thing between us,
like there isn’t a whole world
I’m dragging behind me
every time I open my mouth
and you close yours.

You ask questions like a knife,
not to open me up
but to see if I’ll flinch.
You talk like the past
is some far-off country
you never visited,
like the scars on me
are postcards from someone else’s story.

But I still feel the weight of it—
your mercy,
your silence,
the words you said twice
just to be sure they cut.

Do you?