You Were Never Dirty to Begin With

The water is scalding, turning your skin red, but the heaviness in your marrow refuses to rinse away. You stand there scrubbing, convinced that if you just work harder, the stain will finally lift.

But some weights are not dirt, and no amount of hot water can wash off what lives inside the bone. There was a man lying beside a pool for thirty-eight years, waiting for the water to stir, waiting for an external fix that never came.

The light did not tell him to try harder or scrub cleaner. It simply said: get up.

The heaviness you feel is not a failure of hygiene. It is a signal that you are trying to carry what was meant to be laid down.

You do not need to be cleaner to be held. The light is already in the steam, already in the red skin, already in the exhaustion.

It is not waiting for you to emerge spotless. It is waiting for you to stop scrubbing and realize you were never dirty to begin with.