a twinge of weird hope they no longer believed in
where are you right now?
not where you wish you were. where you actually are.
You just arrived. Something in you still remembers where you came from and the forgetting hasn't finished yet.
The first grief. Not the dramatic kind — the quiet kind. The one that knows something was lost before you had language for it.
The wound became the world. You learned to survive inside it. Some of what you learned kept you alive and some of it sealed you in.
Something worked. Or worked enough. You built a story about the future and for a while it held. This is not naivety — it's chosen brightness, which is braver.
The thing that broke was never the real thing. The fracture is the shape of what's underneath showing through. Most people look away here.
You're still here. You're picking up pieces. They are not rubble — they are a record. What you thought was damage turns out to be data.
The first thing you make. Not from new materials. From exactly what survived. Nobody else had your wreckage so nobody else can make what you're making.