The Wound

You remember the conspiracy of the fall – how an arch stands only because its stones agree to lean inwards. Once, you learnt that they lean to survive. Now you return to meet the stone that catches them. Two opposing sides lean inwards – almost falling – until a single stone is set at the apex. What would have crushed becomes what holds the world open. You carry this same architecture, waiting for the one weight that will make it whole. The weight you were built to bear is the final stone of you.

The Path

You have felt the other way: the drift of unburdened days, doors swinging shut behind you, nothing to hold them open. You floated and called it freedom. Your shoulders forgot their shape. Then the weight arrives, settling into you. Something clicks in your spine, stone finding socket. Your heels press the floor. The whole arch of you exhales. You brace for heaviness, but you find rest. It is the relief of a body finally doing what it was made for. The muscles that ached from holding nothing now ache from use. This is what the keystone knows: its emptiness becomes gate only when pressed from above. What weight completes me? The answer is not in the asking. It is the arch exhaling – the world walking through.

The Shadow

In shadow, the soul flees the weight it was made to bear. The Hollow Arch stands light and elegant, refusing every stone that might press down on him. His father died mid-span, weight still on his shoulders, groaning in his sleep. He watched the bearing break him – cracks spidering through his shoulders, groans replacing his voice. At the funeral, he made his decision. Now he bears no load, spans no chasm, and offers no passage. He remains an elegant silhouette – a doorway that offers no passage. He dies as an elegant shape, forever incomplete. His father, for all his breaking, was at least a door for others. He shoulders the weight every day without fail. He was taught that bearing was virtue – that to complain is weakness, that joy is beside the point. His father carried without singing. His father's father, the same. He taught his own children the exact angle of the shoulders. He did not teach them what the angle was for. Once, the weight shifted and he felt a hum, almost like singing. He crushed it before it could reach his throat. It frightened him. If the bearing could sing, then what had all the silent years been for? He dies having done everything right and felt nothing true. His children inherit the posture – the exact angle of wordless bearing. The weight transfers. The arch stands, and no one walks through.

The Cut