Chart Me Correctly This Time

You opened your mouth and the wallpaper peeled.
Ten years in the “industry,” you said,
like it was a baptism,
as if I haven’t been baptized in things the walls still whisper about.

You looked at me like a blank clipboard.
Like I just arrived with my hands clean.

Your voice?
A laminate sermon peeling off the bones of the real ones.
You spoke like a woman who’s never lost her name to the hush of an institutional hallway.

I’ve eaten the paint off the walls in places that don’t get sunlight.
I’ve held the silence when it had teeth.
I’ve named the ghosts you still call “clients.”

But still, you recited your resume
like it was scripture,
as if your decade
grants you dominion
over who gets to ache out loud.

You mistook me for the intern.
The observer.
The disposable vessel who should thank you for your certified concern.

But I am not new here.
I am not a borrowed name on a badge.
I am the flicker in the security camera.
The scorch mark beneath the trauma poster.
The drawer that won’t close because it remembers.

And I heard your voice like a door slamming shut on every girl I’ve ever been who sat quietly while someone more comfortable claimed to know pain.
Say less.
Say so much less.

I do not need your laminated grief.
I have grown mine in petri dishes and fed it to the gods of rust.
I am fluent in mildew and mercy.

My rage has a pulse and a personnel file.
You wear this work like a pressed suit,
like something you can take off before dinner.

I wear it like skin.
Like a brand.
Like the final language of everyone I couldn’t save.

When you spoke, the ceiling tiles flinched.
The floor hissed under my feet.
Even the walls seemed to ask,
“Does she know who she’s speaking to?”

You don’t.
I am what your industry prays never gets tenure.
The file they bury.
The warning etched in the tile grout no one bothers to bleach out.

You think I arrived yesterday because I don’t carry my ruin like a badge.
But I’ve learned to keep it sheathed —a blade that only hums when it’s disrespected.
And right now, it’s humming.

Say less.
Say so much less.