I am more than my skin, though each morning it is the first scripture I am forced to read. I meet my reflection with a practiced softness, wishing the evidence of survival would loosen its grip, wishing time might unlearn what it carved into me. I try, earnestly, reverently, yet the question still arrives like an accusation: What happened to you? Ten years inside this quiet war. Ten years of ritual and restraint, ointments pressed in like prayers, nights measured in hope and patience. I have not been idle in my becoming. I have shown up daily with discipline and hunger, but the body remembers what the world refuses to forget, and the marks remain, unbargained. So I recede. Not from life itself, but from the weight of seeing. From eyes that linger too long, from streets that echo with unsolicited cures. Every outing becomes a trial, every face a mirror I did not ask for. Advice follows me like scripture misquoted, "Try this. Use that. It will heal". As if effort has not already been exhausted, as if devotion alone could rewrite flesh. They do not witness the ache beneath the surface, the intuition that knows this is more than appearance. They see only disruption, never the emotional alchemy holding me upright. They do not feel the fatigue of carrying wounds that refuse spectacle yet demand endurance. Some nights I fracture under the mirror’s glow, not from weakness, but from the long labor of restraint. I am not breaking; I am weary. Weary of tending injuries that cannot be explained, of stitching myself together in silence. So please, do not name what I already know. I live with it. I listen to it. I carry light and shadow, divinity and hunger, softness and strength, etched into the truth of my skin.