Material After Meaning

What remains is not the story, but the substance. Not the event, but its residue.
What destroyed us was not an instant catastrophe nor a visible blow, but the merciless continuity of abrasion, a slow and patient process in which contact replaced violence, and repetition did what force never needed to do, we were worn down through constant exposure, shaved away particle by particle, until function outlived form and form outlived intention, all those years we believed we were assembling ourselves now appear as a long exercise in reduction, a subtraction so gradual it passed for growth, and the truth emerged only after meaning had exhausted itself, that every time the world touched us, something was taken, not enough to be noticed at once, a thin layer of desire, a residue of belief, the fine dust of aspirations, until what remained no longer demanded to be understood, only accounted for.
Here, identity has collapsed into volume.
There is no boundary between “I” and “the other,” no orientation, no hierarchy—only a compacted mass where difference has been compressed out of existence, bodies no longer organized by purpose but by gravity, by proximity, by the simple fact of having endured long enough to arrive here.
We were not discarded.
We precipitated.
Like sediment after the water has withdrawn, after direction has been forgotten, after flow has ceased to justify itself, we settled into a state where silence is not absence but density, and heaviness does not come from weight, but from accumulation, from memories stripped of ownership, from gestures repeated beyond recognition.

This is not survival as continuation, but survival as remainder.

Not life preserved, but material left behind after meaning has finished its work.