The Wound

The blade finds you in your sleep. You wake reaching but your fingers close on nothing. The steel is gone. What remains is heavier. The wound gapes; in the silence before pain, it asks: What will you make of me?

The Path

The body screams. Seal the breach. Numb the nerve. Wall off the memory before it names itself. You feel the urge to fall in love with the bleeding, pick the scab raw. The panics demands you heal so fast you forget the breaking. To walk through the world in borrowed armour, unwounded and certain. You refuse those mercies. You sit in the break while nerves still burn, and from the pain, a question rises: How did you get past my guard? The blade didn't create the gap in your armour. It found it. You follow the path of your arrogance, straight to the blind spot you defended with fury. Tissue answers tissue, as the skin closes over what it learnt. The new skin is rougher, but it knows. Denser where you were foolish, vigilant where you slept. The sword asked: Are you weak? The scar answers: I was.

The Shadow

Some refuse to answer. The Seamless Man seals his damage instantly. He watched his mother become ghost while still breathing. After her husband's betrayal, she shrank until she fit the space he left. Her silence swallowed the house. He swore: Not me. Now he closes every wound before it can name itself, smiling. But the body holds what the mind refuses to measure. He flinches at shadows. The next blade finds the exact same opening. The Wound Nurse falls in love with the injury. She learns early that an open cut is a summons demanding witness. At first it is unconscious – a story told at dinner, a sleeve that slips. Then deliberate: she learns the pause before revelation, the angle of light that makes the wound gleam. She keeps a fingernail to the seam, tearing the work of the night every morning. Don't heal, she whispers. I'm not finished needing you. She dies with the wound still wet, never meeting who she might have been, had she dared to heal.

The Cut