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He shouted at her, Change.

Why can’t you be more like her?

And she wept quietly, secretly wishing she could.

More beautiful.
More sane.
Less herself.

Less governed by her own spirit moving through a world that had conditioned her sorrow into fragmented shards she would spend years gathering with trembling hands, like jagged pieces of glass too brittle to hold and too painful to look at directly. So instead, she concealed them beneath makeup, beneath performance, beneath the ambitions of men who warned her gently, then cruelly:

Just do not be too much.

Do not make us uncomfortable with the size of your feeling, the depth of your knowing, the sharpness of your intuition. Become smaller so we may remain undisturbed. Become quieter so we do not have to hear ourselves inside your suffering.

I would rather blame you.
Control you.
Reshape you into something easier to survive beside.

I would rather call you selfish than confront the selfishness fermenting inside me. I would rather crucify you than examine the places within myself that refuse to change. And so he lifted her onto an invisible cross, believing somehow that one more sacrifice, one more silencing of a woman, might finally release the doves of peace he himself could not find.

But peace never came.

Because this man had already turned upon himself long before he turned upon her.

Like a serpent consuming its own flesh, he disemboweled himself spiritually, tearing apart every wounded piece of his own humanity while desperately searching for someone else to blame for the emptiness inside him. And with a Bible draped across his lap, he searched for answers, but what he found instead was judgment sharpened into weaponry.

He found pain disguised as righteousness.

He found fear masquerading as authority.

And within his own knowledge, he discovered the oldest temptation of all: to confuse control with virtue, to mistake domination for wisdom. His thoughts branched outward like the limbs of ancient trees, twisting toward shame, toward punishment, toward inherited sin, until even love itself became something he could only understand through suffering.

And she, standing before him trembling yet unbroken, became the mirror he could not bear to look into for too long, as he reminded himself: look away or become fixed. Look away or become solid, become man, become temporary.