I had a body before the night began to rain. It was a house of flesh with windows lit, a small temple where the soul rested its forehead against the skin. Then someone entered my most sacred darkness and broke the bread of my light.
They came bearing stones hurled by absent hands, verdicts born in darkness, and the hatred of those who wound from afar, leaving others to bear the weight of blood. The bruises faded through the mercy of colour. The bites withdrew from the skin with the weary gait of beasts already sated.
Since then, I have learned that the body can become a foreign room, a bed filled with nails, a rose sealed by frost in the wrong month. I have learned that a word can cause a bruise, that a sentence can leave a scar, and that mockery can keep gnawing long after.
Yet within me there remained a nave of shadow, hidden inside a wounded church. The skin knows anguish before the mouth, before thought, before forgiveness. It knows the scent of fear: that cold iron which enters the mind and remains there, seated like a sick king. It knows the poison of a voice, the blow of a sentence, the blade of another’s laughter, the bite of the anonymous figure who throws mud and calls their own hunger truth.
I carried silence upon my shoulders like a black cloak. People looked at my face and said, “You are safe.” But sometimes salvation is only a closed door behind which the room is still burning.
Then the fragrance came. It came without a sound, as certain graces come after ruin. It entered the wound with hands of air, with blood made of light, with a dark patience. It said to me, “Your skin belongs to you.” It said, “Your soul still has a name.”
And so I rose, clothed in iron, smoke, leather, ash, burned rose and the bitter resin that consoles only those who have walked through fire. I rose with the black ink of the words I had been given transformed into a seal upon my skin. I rose with the stones I had gathered one by one and melted into a crown.
Vulnus. That is what I called my wound when it ceased to be shame and became power. That is what I called my name when it emerged from the mud with a sharper light. That is what I called my body when it returned to claim its place in the world with all its strength.
That is what I called the beauty born from my abyss: liquid armour, a fierce light, a fragrance rising from the ashes and saying to the world, “I belong to myself. I still belong to myself.”
I have lost blood, but I have found gold. I have known the shadow, but now I rule my own night.
