Footnotes

There is a quiet, lodged in my spine

Not mercy, not rest

A held breath that has learned to last

They call it L5
They dress it in tidy syllables

Compression

Degeneration

Small, sterile consolations

For something that does not console

My body refuses neatness

It speaks in pressure
In the slow persuasion of weight

In the way a column leans and does not admit it

In the way it carries
long past asking

Some days it rises like a verdict

Not loud, never theatrical, only exact

YOU WILL MOVE
BUT DIFFERENTLY

And I do

I rise into it

Into the narrow corridor of standing

Into the careful arithmetic of steps

Measuring what remains against what is required

There are mornings
when my body feels older than light

As if time has settled in me unevenly

Heavier in the places no one sees

And still
there is no audience for this

No ceremony
for the quiet labor
of holding oneself together

Only this private endurance

This unremarked fidelity to movement

I have bent around it

Reshaped myself to accommodate the untied

Made room for the ache
as one makes room
for a difficult truth

And somewhere in that making, something fierce remained

Not untouched, but unwilling to disappear

The spine bends, but it does not relinquish me

It holds, not gently, not kindly, but with a severity that resembles grace

I have learned that faith is not brightness, not relief, not even hope as it is often spoken

FAITH, is this . .

The quiet decision to stand again inside a body that has already asked too much of itself

To move, when movement is no longer given, but taken

Step by deliberate step

To carry what has no language

And so

I proceed, revised, contained

Still bearing my own weight

Not because I am unbroken

But because
I did not leave when breaking began