Assimilation

I was moving the way you move when movement itself feels ordinary, when the thing carrying you feels dependable enough that you don’t think about it, and then suddenly the world folded in a way that erased that assumption entirely, metal collapsing inward, surfaces bending and pressing too close together, the shape that had been carrying me losing all resemblance to something meant to hold a person, and in the stillness afterward there was a smell that lingered longer than it should have, heat and something sharp and electrical hanging in the air as if the moment needed time to finish happening.

I became aware of my breathing before anything else, the strange relief of realizing it was still there, and as I shifted my weight the structure around me resisted, forcing my body into careful negotiations, twisting and finding narrow passages where space used to exist, easing myself out slowly through a crushed geometry that no longer obeyed the rules it had been built with.

When I stood up, there was no clear announcement of loss, no immediate signal that something essential had been taken, and that absence of certainty stayed with me, the wreckage behind me obvious and complete while I remained upright in front of it, aware of the familiar pull in my shoulders, aware of the memory of weight, aware of what it feels like to have carried things for a long time.

Afterward, the world began to adjust itself around me in small, almost courteous ways, a hesitation before handing me anything, a subtle rerouting of responsibility, a quiet recalibration of what was expected, as if the event itself had granted permission for people to assume there were limits now, things it would be unkind to ask of me anymore.

No one ever said what they believed had happened to me, and I understood that they didn’t need to, because the sight of the wreckage had already completed the story for them, had supplied the missing pieces, had made it necessary that something inside me must have been damaged to account for the violence of what they imagined, because without that conclusion the force of it all would have nowhere to land.

I began to notice how often people avoided my hands, how objects were placed just out of reach or passed to someone else instead, how the expectation that I could carry weight seemed to dissolve without discussion, and in those moments I felt the quiet dissonance of standing inside a body that still knew its own strength while being treated as though something essential had been lost.

I never interrupted the story they were telling themselves, not because I believed it, but because correcting it would have required a kind of performance, a demonstration of capacity that felt strangely humiliating, as though my wholeness needed proof, as though survival without visible damage was somehow incomplete.

So I remained where I was, aware of what still worked, aware of what had endured, allowing the aftermath to speak for me, standing inside myself without explanation, carrying what I always had while the world moved around me under the assumption that something had been taken that never actually was.