Held

Ambient music for the hour before the bipeds wake, when the night's last wingbeats slow, the hunting has been good, and a small body folds into the warmth that carries it. The crack in the wall is only a few strokes away. Outside, the world is beginning the noise it does not know it makes. What hides is not lost; it is what the morning will never quite see, and so will never quite damage. The shelter is not the stone; it is the warmth held inside it.

This is the stillness of a return at first light: tender exhaustion, a body held against a larger body, warmth kept where the cold stone cannot reach it. The hidden world goes on, unseen by the dawn it has just escaped. For wound-bearers who have learned to live by vanishing, who keep what matters in the part of themselves the world is not yet allowed to enter. Headphones. Stay with it.