Ledgers

Every bond begins like a bargain. A smile offered, a kindness spent, a promise left waiting in silence. For a while it feels fair, almost balanced, until one careless act collapses everything built with care. Nothing lasts longer than the moment someone decides it doesn’t.

Disappointment doesn’t strike in one clean blow. It grows. Slow, corrosive, like salt gnawing through coral. I feel it gather drop by drop until it settles in my marrow. I collect each slight in silence, press the fragments against bone, carry the evidence of my own undoing as if it were proof I exist.

I never learned how to live in this skin without tearing at it. Giving drains me, taking feels like theft, and so I teach myself I don’t deserve gentleness. It is easier to carry the word evil than it is to carry hope. That word explains the bruise, even if it isn’t true.

I test myself the way a tongue presses on a cracked tooth, searching for pain just to know the crack is real. Again and again I break myself open, half to see if anyone will notice, half because breaking is the only ritual I know. Connections is an illusion. It fold back into contracts, seller and buyer, debts hidden under every smile. No gift arrives without a receipt tucked beneath it, so I leave before I am handed the bill.

I fold myself away first, convincing everyone it was my choice.

Everything turns transactional. Every connection thins into echo, all those weightless promises dissolving before they ever touch the shore. The things they claim to ask for nothing, to love as if giving without measure feel like myth. Prometheus loved humanity enough to hand them eternal fire, and what did he get? A gift meant to save, but one that chained him to agony, scorched him for eternity.

So I walk alone, not from pride or strength but from erosion. Piece by piece, the world has taken until there is nothing left to give. What remains are the debts carved into me by other hands, damage I never earned but cannot return. If the universe were fair, Socrates would still be questioning, Plato would still be failing to capture the answers, and maybe the world would learn to listen instead of silence. But fairness is only a ghost. It watches and never intervenes.

I can’t imagine the shore anymore. But I see the vast and cold sea. A tide that takes without apology and returns without promise. It keeps no memory, no mercy. And maybe that is the closest thing to truth. Because here, every kindness is tallied, every cruelty excused, every act reduced to numbers on a ledger. People call it justice, but it is the same logic that killed the greatest mind. They judged, they measured, they silenced. That is what people do. And in the end, it isn’t wisdom that lingers, but the echo of their pettiness, clinging like rot to the ruins they made.