It already happened, the gun is still smoking. Has it ended for everyone or just me? There are gaps in remembering. Whole sections are missing. The body holds on tightly. Reaction becomes instinct. Softness begins to feel like survival—covering what feels dangerous, holding what cannot be examined directly. Kindness and madness start to resemble one another, my mind unable to separate the two. Beneath careful surfaces something unsettled remains alive, watchful, and unresolved. Evil does not require permission. Outside the world is screaming with violence and despair. Inside the struggle grows quieter and harder to measure, questions repeating without answer. Control slips away slowly, almost politely. Change arrives uninvited, rearranging all. This is not absolute resolution, it is about time passing without demanding sense, allowing it to exist loosely, if at all. 

This work lives in that space: between knowing and not knowing, between care and withdrawal, between quiet and collapse. It does not offer answers, just documentation of living inside uncertainty after sexual violence. Giving language to the quiet, just to fill some time. Reminded that I carry a mind that holds more than it reveals, I can’t help but ask if I’ve brought it upon myself. I can’t help but see the evil we all have, some deeper than others. Even filled with lace and love I am full of hate that occupies the same space.