The Sorrows of Medea

I remain seated, not in repose but in exhaustion. My body has forgotten the desire to stand, as if the weight of the world has passed through bone and settled into flesh. Anger moves beneath the skin with a patient cruelty; it does not erupt, it does not fracture, it erodes, like water that remembers the shape of stone. I have withdrawn from all others—not because I was cast out, but because nothing within me still opens toward another. Names have dissolved. Faces have thinned into shadows. What endures is a body that remembers touch and no longer answers it.

I am in mourning, though not in the manner they expect. My grief has no ceremony. It has folded itself into silence, into the creases of the skin, into the burden of the shoulders, into a fury that finds no exit. Betrayal did not arrive as a sudden wound; it formed slowly, like a cold rising from the ground, reaching the feet, then the abdomen, then the chest, until even breathing acquired a foreign taste. I gave until I was emptied, and now this emptiness—more than the loss itself—has become intolerable.

I do not return to what was, not out of pride, but because return is no longer possible. What has been given has lost its name. What has been broken admits no repair. What remains is a body still warm, still aware of its own gravity, still capable of collapsing without spectacle. At times I press my hands against myself—not for comfort, but to confirm that I am still here, that I can still feel pain, that I can still be sustained by this quiet, enduring hatred.

I no longer ask. I no longer wait. Even my mourning has become a form of isolation. My anger is mute, yet alive; my disillusionment deep, yet orderly; my contempt moves like a shadow, always slightly behind me. If anything of me endures, it is this standing upon the edge—where return has lost its meaning and falling has not yet declared itself. I remain here, in the state where sorrow no longer passes through, but abides, and the body becomes the final place where truth is still remembered.