Hell Hath No Fury…

I said it once in a room that kept time in postponed promises,

a sentence folded into the seam of a canceled dinner,

left like a coat on the back of a chair—there if you needed it,

but never pulled over your shoulders.

I learned to be the soft thing people relied on:

the pillow you press your head into and forget,

the bandage you peel off at dawn because the day demanded you be whole.

My calendar is a ledger of polite betrayals—

maybe next time scrawled in the margins of birthdays;

sorry, traffic under the photograph of a plan that never was.

You treat my availability like a liability you can hedge:

reschedule, postpone, ghost, repeat.

I staple my patience back together until my fingers ache.

There is a grammar to being the one who understands:

you conjugate my silence into saint, my tolerance into virtue.

I speak in the soft tense—always conditional, always deferred—

until my sentences begin to crumble from the weight of their already.

You are practiced at the art of forgetting:

a small thing here, a small thing there,

until the architecture of me tilts.

You call it convenience; I call it excavation—

they remove me piece by piece in the name of casual living.

Do you know what it is to be a door left ajar for years?

To have your jamb worn down by the same hand that never closes you properly?

My hinges have a history of your comings and goings;

they whisper your excuses at night like prayer beads.

I have made space so often I have a map of hollows—

the exact curve of absence, the place where the elbow of an apology rests.

I have been carried like luggage through your life—checked, tagged, and left.

So I learned the long arithmetic of bending:

how many stretches before you stop returning to shape?

How many “sure, I’m fine”s equals a fracture?

You measure my kindness as margin—thin, expendable, assumed infinite.

You never account for the invisible tally:

the small deaths that add up,

the quiet compressions of hope until it is barely a coin in my palm.

I am rich with forgiven debts you will never repay.

⸻

And there is a point when even the ocean remembers its own shore.

The tide keeps a ledger you cannot read until it crashes

where you thought everything was permanent.

My patience is not a well with endless water;

it is a dam with a slow leak.

For years I patched you with words:

go ahead, take it, I understand, don’t worry about me.

Each patch made of something softer—empathy, habit, fear—

until the dam learned to tremble.

When the crack widened, I did not whisper.

I named it. I pointed to the rent in the wall.

For that—oh, for that—you called me unreasonable, dramatic, unkind.

You folded my truth into accusation

the way you fold laundry: quickly, to look like care.

You taught me silence was virtue.

So I practiced silence until it felt like skill.

I swallowed resentments the way some swallow pills—

neatly, with water, because medicine must be consumed.

But medicine has a dose and a limit; too much poisons.

So when I finally spoke, my words were not the shrillness you fear—

they were the precise, clean names for what had been done to me.

You flinched like I had thrown a stone

at a window you cherished more than my voice.

There is a hunger in being overlooked

that teaches you how to burn slow.

Not spectacle pyres, not the fireworks of sudden cruelty—

but furnaces that learn to hold heat

until everything flammable has been reduced to truth.

I collected all the small combustibles:

the unreturned calls, the postponed plans, the casual apologies,

and laid them like kindling under the quiet of my dignity.

I did not rage for show.

I lit candles for myself and watched the wax

learn how to melt toward light.

You were astonished by the warmth that came back at you.

You pretended it was anger without cause,

but you were the cause.

You pretend now that mercy was my default and you my exception—

but mercy is a choice, not a habitat.

I chose mercy until I could not choose it anymore.

Then I chose myself.

I built new closets labeled differently:

no, not tonight,

try again when you keep your word.

My syllables grew sharper—precision replacing

the murky soup of acquiescence.

Friends whispered be reasonable

like a lullaby meant to soothe my edges back into submission.

Lovers murmured compromise

as if compromise could paste over the hollow

where respect should live.

Compromise is not a spell that erases pattern;

it is a craft that requires two hands.

You left me to craft alone.

In the ash of all that folding,

I found a shape that did not apologize for existing.

I found that being held as an option

is worse than being held as an enemy—

at least an enemy says your name aloud.

You were polite in your neglect,

which made the neglect sting like betrayal dipped in sugar.

I learned to count the ways you did not choose me

so I would know the true weight of myself.

Numbers do not lie:

nights missed, calls unanswered, plans dissolved.

I added them up and found a sum

that did not equal the cost of my patience.

When I moved through the world with new rules,

you called me severe.

When I saved my yeses for those who kept theirs,

you labeled me selfish.

I call it economy:

only spend your currency where interest returns.

I am not made of the cheap metals you assume—

I am alloyed with constancy,

and now with a hardness you did not teach me to respect.

It is not cruelty to demand reciprocity;

it is survival.

You will ask, later—if you ever learn to ask—

why the door is closed.

You will wonder what made the waiting room a furnace,

why the lobby smoked instead of sighed.

Did you expect a slow erosion to look like nothing?

Did you imagine I would never name the theft?

I did not become the heat to burn you;

I became the heat to remember myself.

I returned the warmth you borrowed

and never meant to give back.

So hear me now and remember what you were given:

I was the after-image of your kindness,

the comfortable contingency behind every plan.

You made me optional by omission

and then punished me for refusing to be that option.

Now I am a boundary with teeth—

polite, exacting, immovable when it matters.

I will not be convenient.

And if you still cannot see me,

it is because seeing me would require work.

It would require re-learning rhythms,

reassigning priorities,

admitting a tiny trespass—

that you thought you could leave me and I would stay.

To admit that is to be small

in front of someone you hurt,

and most prefer to remain large

lest they look like thieves.

Didn’t your infinite wisdom ever tell you?

Hell hath no fury like a woman forgotten.