Softness With Teeth

Soft people

are not soft everywhere.

¶

A river can nourish a valley

and still drown a man

who mistakes kindness

for safety.

¶

That is the part people resent.

¶

They meet tenderness

with dirty hands,

arrive carrying entitlement

like a crowbar,

then act wounded

when the door no longer opens for them.

¶

And suddenly,

the soft person is called cruel.

¶

Cold.

Distant.

Difficult.

¶

As if softness

is something owed.

As if gentleness must survive

every violation

to be considered real.

¶

But softness is not stupidity.

¶

It learns.

¶

It remembers the mouths

that bit while asking to be fed.

The hands that reached only to take.

The people who treated compassion

like an infinite resource,

drinking from it

until the well tasted of rust.

¶

There are people

who have never seen my teeth

because they never gave me reason

to bare them.

¶

There are people

who know me

as warm bread,

open palms,

the careful stitching of wounds

no one else noticed were bleeding.

¶

And then there are others

who speak of me

like I am made of sharpened steel.

¶

Both versions are true.

¶

You do not get access

to the garden

after trampling the roots.

¶

You do not get softness

from someone

you taught to survive you.

¶

That hardness you encountered

was not my nature.

¶

It was scar tissue.

¶

It was the body

closing around the injury.

¶

People love to romanticize

soft hearts

until softness develops boundaries.

Until it says no

without trembling.

Until it refuses

to keep setting itself on fire

to keep parasites warm.

¶

Then suddenly,

they call it bitterness.

¶

No.

¶

Bitterness begs to be loved.

¶

This is discernment.

¶

This is a blade

finally understanding

it was never meant

to be handled

by careless hands.

¶

And if you found me hard,

if my voice cut,

if my silence starved you—

¶

maybe it was because

you arrived

expecting access

to a tenderness

you did not know how to protect.