✨ She deserved better.✨
Another woman’s hands on the skin that should have been sacred ground between them. She felt it and it felt like a thorn in her chest, a betrayal so casual he laughed at her.
It wasn’t rage, it was the trembling clarity of love saying, “This is mine to name. This is my boundary.”
When she spoke, her voice carried the ache of boundaries crossed, the tremor of a heart saying,
“This is not love, this is loss.”
And what did he give her?
Not remorse. Not even shame. Just the spit of words meant to cut her small. He laughed, shrugged, spat out a careless blade of words:
“If you’re that petty, you can leave.”
Petty. As if commitment were small. As if respect was free. As if love should wear chains of silence and surrender. As if fidelity is a joke. As if devotion should be a one-way street paved with her silence. As if respect were a trinket too cheap to carry.
No, she wasn’t petty. She was awake. She was done bargaining with crumbs while he gorged himself to obesity on her loyalty. She was done bowing at an altar where the offering was always her.
So she stood. And her standing was fire. She walked. And her walking was thunder. Not in fury, but in clarity. She gathered her worth like wildflowers, her dignity like river stones, her spirit like the hawk in flight. And she left.
She left because she honors herself. Because the river inside her does not run dry for a man who cannot cup his hands with reverence. Because she will not shrink her soul to fit inside his absence of respect.
Not because she was petty, but because she was powerful. Not because she lacked love, but because she carried it. For herself, first, and for the truth that no woman should shrink to fit inside a coward’s absence of respect.
The bayou remembers. It holds the echo of her footsteps, not as retreat, but as a woman claiming her worth. And the mud did not swallow her— it crowned her. The water mirrored her strength.
She did not leave in pettiness. She left in power. She left in truth. And she will never again apologize for refusing to stay where love was already gone.
She walked away… and in walking, she was free.
And if respect looks like pettiness … then petty she shall be.