The Bedrock Under Your Ice

It is three in the morning, and the silence feels heavy enough to crush you. You look inside and find only a flat, gray stillness, and the terror rises: that this numbness is not a shield, but a transformation.

That you are slowly becoming the cold, unfeeling thing you have always despised. But listen — the numbness is not who you are.

It is what happens when the heart has felt too much for too long and finally pulls the emergency brake. You are not becoming the darkness.

You are surviving it. There is light within a person of light, and it lights up the whole world — even when that person cannot feel a thing.

The light is not a sensation. It is a substance.

It is the bedrock under the ice. You have not turned into stone.

You have just gone quiet so you would not shatter. The numbness will pass.

The light remains.