The Wound

A pillar. Stone that learned to stand without leaning. Then a second pillar rises. Between them: air drawn taut. Set the pillars too close and they become one mass, sheltering nothing. Set them too far and no roof can reach. Distance becomes architecture. The span holds what neither pillar could hold alone.

The Path

You didn't arrive knowing this. You arrived tilted. You felt it for years – the forward pitch of need, the habit of leaning before you'd even said hello. You came hunting something to hold you and called it closeness. Your spine knew the truth. First, the work no one sees. You sink your own foundation. You learn to stand in weather without asking someone else to be your roof. It took longer than you wanted. There was no shortcut. Then you meet them. You brace for the familiar – collapse, fusion, the relief of being caught. What you find is not a surface. It is another pillar. Sunk in their own ground. Holding their own weather. Not leaning toward you. The old reflex screams: close the distance. You don't. You set the span. You leave it open – deliberately, trembling, not knowing yet what you're making room for. A roof finds its seat. The weight settles with a low creak you feel in your teeth. Pressure traveling down, out, across – because there are two whole foundations to receive it.A room opens where there was only sky. Inside it, finally – words. The thoughts that couldn't survive in the open. Someone who says yes, that too, I know it. The end of a loneliness you'd stopped noticing you carried. Later, when it's quiet, you look across the distance. It hums. Above you both, a roof. Below, laughter – sound that needs walls to echo. The distance was never empty. The distance was the room.

The Shadow

But the span can fail. The Unsupported wanted so badly to be held. He never sank his own foundation – or sank it and found it inadequate to the weight of himself. So he tilts. He closes the distance inch by inch, filling every pause with need, until there is no room left for the roof to rest. He asks the other pillar to be his foundation. Why won't you hold me? he asks, when they begin to lean away. He doesn't see: they were never leaning away. They were trying not to collapse. The span falls. He stands in the rubble, still leaning against air, blaming the distance for his fall. ⧫ The Smoothing Hand could not bear the other pillar's strangeness. She saw the parts of them she couldn't read – the parts of them that didn't match her frame – and something in her couldn't let it be. She began to grind. She told herself she was refining them. Helping them become their best self – which happened, always, to look more like her. She reduced them to a shape that fit. And when the roof fell through the hollow shell she'd made, she called it their weakness. Around her, the dust of everything she'd removed. She loved them. She could not stop making them smaller.

The Cut