“Patience has its limits. Take it too far and its cowardice.”

- George Jackson

---

‘Coward,’ they whispered, ‘coward, coward, coward,’ they were met only with irritated looks and silence.

‘Patient,’ she tells herself and lets it go, ‘tolerant,’ she says. They’re only words wrapped up in bows and pretty paper. They’re nicer words than coward, but in the end they mean about the same.

She takes her faults and cuts them into smaller pieces and binds them into pretty patterns and then shows them to the world; a world that doesn’t immediately recognize them as faults. But despite how nice she’s made them look they’re still faults and they’re still hers, and she still refuses to admit she’s flawed at all.

‘Patience is a virtue,’ she thinks and a small part of her screams at her to stop lying. Another screams for her to do something reckless.

‘Patient,’ she says, ‘tolerant,’ she says, but still they whisper, ‘coward,’ and slowly she’s coming to realize, they’re right.