Fool Me Once
Fool me once,
Shame on you.
That’s what they say, right?
As if pain arrives neatly packaged,
As if betrayal comes with a warning label,
As if love doesn’t sometimes wear the face
Of the thing that ruins you.
Fool me once,
And I called it misunderstanding.
I dressed your cruelty in softer clothes,
Called it stress,
Called it trauma,
Called it “you didn’t mean it like that.”
I became a translator
For a language made entirely of wounds.
I took every sharp word
And turned it sideways in my mouth
So it wouldn’t cut you
The way it cut me.
Fool me twice,
Shame on me.
Because twice became ten times,
Became a hundred,
Became eulogies
For the parts of me that kept believing.
Because every time you broke me
I handed you the hammer back
Like maybe this time
You would use it to build something.
Maybe this time
Your hands would learn tenderness.
Maybe this time
The fire would remember it was once just warmth.
But no.
It was always the same script.
You hurt me.
You apologized in the shape of tears.
I mistook remorse for change.
You reached for power
And I placed it in your palm
Like an offering,
Like a prayer,
Like a fool kneeling at the altar
Of potential.
I kept loving the ghost of who you could be
While the reality of who you were
Kept sinking its teeth into me.
I bet it tasted like rust and blood
And hope.
I stood at the doorway
Of my own destruction
And kept calling it home.
I looked at bruises on my spirit
And said,
“No, wait,
They love me.”
Or
“No, wait,
They’re family.”
I kept confusing familiarity
With safety.
I let your hands
Become the weather in my life.
I gave you matches
Every time you promised
Not to burn me again.
When you smiled,
I could still see my blood staining it.
Fool me once,
Shame on you.
Fool me twice,
Shame on me.
Fool me three times, four, five, six—
At what number
Does shame just swallow you whole?
Because I am full of it.
Shame in the marrow.
Shame in the mirror.
Shame stitched into every version of myself
That said
T stay.
Stay.
They’ll change.
Stay.
They didn’t mean it.
Stay.
Love is patient.
Stay
Until patience turns into self-erasure.
And maybe that is the deepest humiliation:
Not that you hurt me,
But that I kept handing you the knife
After pulling it from where you left it
In my flesh.
I kept unlocking the cage door
Only to crawl back inside it.
I kept expecting a miracle
From the same hands
That only ever knew how to
A make wreckage of me.
They call that insanity, don’t they?
Doing the same thing
Over and over
And expecting a different result.
I call it hope’s uglier sister.
The one with hollow eyes.
The one who keeps waiting at the window
For storms to become sunlight.
The one who thinks
If she just loves harder,
Bleeds quieter,
Forgives faster—
Pain will finally learn mercy.
Fool me once,
That was your sin.
Fool me twice,
That is my shame and sorrow.
And I will wallow about it tonight
Then trust you again tomorrow,
Rinse,
Then repeat,
Until I finally learn my lesson.
Thank you so much for reading <3
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xoxo, madlizze
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The game keeps going until one stops. Good piece. The emotion and the thing we call love lingers in every moment. Thanks for the read.
"As if love doesn’t sometimes wear the face
Of the thing that ruins you." ahhhh