Fissile

Neoclassical ambient music for the part of you that has been adored and stepped on, and stopped asking which one was the truth.

A shell speaks. It was made by tide and pressure and slow time, born of a mantle and a disturbance, polished into something beautiful, and then, matter-of-factly, walked over. It was picked up, admired, kept in the cup of a hand like treasure; and the next day, without a thought, a foot came down on it. Not as punishment. Not as malice. Only the weight of time, moving on. Being a beloved thing does not protect you from being crushed. These are not opposites. They are the same life, held at once.

The shell no longer protests. It has come to hold both: the tenderness and the heel, the light that makes it shine and the step that cracks it. Perhaps that is what it is to be alive: to carry at once what lifts us and what breaks us.

For wound-bearers who have stopped waiting for the weight to lift.

Headphones. Let it breathe.