The Healer’s Wound
There is a certain kind of mercy that ruins the one who gives it. You learned this young— that some souls arrive fractured, and some arrive hungry, and some arrive carrying a silence so heavy it needs a body to collapse into. Yours was always the nearest body. You became the place where storms broke. Not because you were strong, but because you never stepped aside. You let people shatter against you as if your ribs were a shoreline and their grief was the tide that believed it had the right to return. Every life you stitched back together left a seam inside you that never closed. A private fault line. A quiet, widening ache. The kind of wound that doesn’t bleed— it thinks. It remembers. It keeps score in the dark. H...