The Wound

You don't choose the moment you break. It chooses you, and chooses where. A grain of sand slips past your defenses and lodges where you're most tender. Your flesh contracts, reaching for a before that no longer exists. You clench harder but the grit has already settled. Still you fight – until muscle forgets the enemy and knows only the grip. Then, deeper than refusal, your body answers without asking permission: nacre arrives at the wound, layer finding layer, each breath-thin veil settling over the last. You learn to breathe around the burn.

The Path

Even as the nacre thickens, you beg for reversal – to wake and find the grit dissolved, the old self restored. That body is gone. Only this one remains, with something foreign at its centre. No one wraps for another – it happens unseen. Years of work, solitary. Some mornings the pain is gone. Then you shift, and the grit reminds you it is still there, waiting to be addressed. Then one morning, it stops reminding. You shift and feel only smoothness. You press harder, expecting the familiar grain. Nothing. You search for the grain that started everything but your fingers find only luster. You feel what you made from what almost unmade you. Dense, luminous, unmistakably yours. The grain is still there – somewhere at the centre, entombed in nacre so thick it will never touch you again. You have transformed it into something the wound could never have become alone.

The Shadow

The Averted Eye feels the grit lodged at his centre and looks away. His wife asked once. He was already standing, already at the window, talking about the weather. She learned not to ask. He angles his body so the edge lodges in his blind spot – where feeling can't reach, where he won't look. His spine learns the shape of his avoidance. The grit does not grow – it doesn't need to. It sits where he left it, its edges still sharp. He grows around the absence of his own attention – lopsided, hollow on one side, armoured everywhere it doesn't matter. They find him curled around the hollow, his body a crescent moon bent away from its own centre. The grit, still sharp, has worn through from the inside. No nacre ever arrived to answer it. ⧫ The Iridescent Ruin wrapped once. The nacre was hardening, the grit becoming hers – but the self taking shape around the wound was a stranger, and she could not bear to meet her. She knew the woman she was before the grit. She didn't know who she would become after the wrapping was done. Each time nacre begins to gather, she tears it away before it sets. She prefers the familiar pain to the unfamiliar self. The wound, at least, she recognises. Her hands are beautiful with ruins – iridescent, shimmering with almost. The light catches a hundred beginnings, each one stopped before it could finish becoming something new. She dies mid-transformation – neither the woman she was nor the woman she might have been. The nacre, interrupted so many times, has become scar tissue: hard, rough, catching no light at all.

The Cut