“Weariness can snatch away even pain itself.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche

A Collaboration with EC (@erroneouschoices)

In the sorrow of pearl light cast on flesh and scraps of iron, it becomes more than hiding in the shadows or peeling the skin back.

Something stops fighting for its life there.

Quieter and harder to explain.  Not healing. Just less violence.

The body stops treating itself like evidence.

The old instinct to dissect every wound, to hold each memory up to the light until it gives a confession, begins to loosen its grip. The room stays dim. The rain still carries the smell of iron. The skin still remembers hands that reached for it without tenderness. But the need to make suffering something more starts to die.

Exhaustion has its own mercy.

After enough years, even grief grows tired of hearing itself speak. It settles lower inside the ribs. Becomes sediment instead of weather. You stop peeling yourself apart looking for the exact place the ruin began. You begin, almost accidentally, to inhabit yourself again.

Not beautifully. Not cleanly.

Just still there.

Pearl light on bare shoulders. Salt drying on the skin. Sand gathering in corners. The ordinary fact of remaining.