you want to know why i was sharp with you? why my words were like a slamming door? you stand there, in your quiet, tidy completeness, and you judge the splinter. you never think of the hammer.

you ask for calm, for reason, as if my tempers are a switch i refuse to flip. you have no idea. the feeling comes — a hot, formless thing — and i have no room for it. so i force it down. i build a cellar inside myself, and in that damp, airless dark, i store every slight, every panic, every unshed tear. i stack them like cordwood, these emotions you would find so inconvenient. i am a curator of silence, an archivist of hurt. and you, you are a visitor who complains about the dust on the shelves.

this rudeness you so despise? it is not the attack you think it is — a structural failure. it is the groan of a beam holding up a weight it was never meant to carry. a single, careless word from you—the final, feather-light straw—and the whole rotten structure gives way. what you call my 'outburst' is merely the rubble. you see the explosion and blame the dynamite, never the years of pressure compacting it.

and this self you present to me, this finished portrait of patience and understanding — do you think i don’t see the cracks you’ve painted over? do you think your own composure isn’t a performance? the difference is, you have the space for it. your soul has closets and attics and rooms you can lock. i feel i was born without walls, a constant, raw nerve exposed to the weather of the world. my incompleteness is a chasm i am always trying to fill with this same silence, and it is a bottomless thing. it swallows everything, and gives back nothing but this hollow, aching echo.

so when i am short with you, when my voice is a blade, keep in mind: it is not you i am trying to cut, but the ropes that bind this chaos inside me. it is a frantic, failed surgery on my own spirit, while you are standing there with your bandages and your disapproving eyes, wondering why i don't just will the wound closed.

the hardest part is not the storm inside. it is your insistence on sunshine. it is your deafness to the thunder, your blindness to the flood, and your utter, infuriating conviction that my drowning is a choice.