The Wound

You are born unlit – not dark, only reflecting. Surface so polished you could pass for sun, at the right angle, in someone else's light. Around you, the cosmos blazes. Beneath the polish, mass you didn't know you carried presses inwards. Decades of unlived heat compress toward a core you refuse to ignite. Your ribs ache with the weight of who you refused to become. Eventually, the pressure finds a fault line.

The Path

Now: the choice. You stand at the fracture, every instinct pulling towards it. The version people loved will burn – careful angles, the borrowed glow. Some relationships built on reflection will not survive. Perhaps most. But the alternative is a lifetime smiling while the surface groans around you. The fracture widens. The version people loved burns first. What tears through is what you compressed – heat that was never borrowed. You expected nothing beneath the surface. Your hands stop posing. Your eyes stop asking permission. You wait for the emptiness. It doesn't come. The false surface burns away. The angles you held dissolve into warmth.

The Shadow

Some never ignite. The Borrowed Sun spends his life angling towards the nearest fire, catching each passing blaze and throwing back a brilliance he never made. For a moment, he is indistinguishable from a star. Then the fire moves on and his light dies the instant the world looks away. One night, silence fills the space where borrowed light used to be. The fire he orbited found a brighter mirror. He could ignite – the pressure has been building for years, the core is ready. He pictures it: the admission that everything before was performance. The grief of having been cold the whole time. The look on their faces when they realise they never knew him. He cannot picture further. What lies past the grief is dark to him. He waits in the dark for another flame. He ends as he began: a flawless mirror facing nothing.

The Cut