What We Keep

What We Keep

There are days when the world feels too loud to endure. Not loud with music or laughter, but with cruelty, with spectacle, with a hunger for harm that no longer bothers to hide itself. Terror moves openly now. It does not whisper. It does not apologize. It walks through streets and screens and institutions alike, daring anyone to call it what it is. I am not afraid to name it. I am simply tired of standing in its wind.

There is a part of me that wants to disappear into the deep green places, where the trees do not argue, where the earth does not perform, where no one is rewarded for brutality. I imagine Morrigan beside me, the quiet between us heavy and sufficient, the kind of silence that does not demand anything. I think of fire contained, not weaponized. I think of days measured by light and breath instead of outrage and vigilance. This longing is not weakness. It is grief looking for shelter.

I am not blind to the irony of it. I know what I am. By most measures, I am a monster. I drink blood. I survive by taking. I have ended lives. I do not pretend otherwise. What unsettles me is not the presence of monsters in the world. It is the number of them who refuse to know themselves.

A monster who knows her hunger can place limits on it. She can build ritual around it. She can choose where and how it is fed. Terror does not come from fangs or claws. It comes from denial. It comes from violence that calls itself order, cruelty that insists it is necessary, systems that devour and then ask to be thanked for it. Fangs are honest. Power that refuses to name itself is not.

The world tells us that meaning is found by enduring everything, by staying visible, by continuing to engage no matter how corrosive the cost. I no longer believe that. There is a lie embedded in that demand. Terror feeds on constant witness. Brutality thrives when it is allowed to live rent free in the nervous system. Stepping back is not abandonment. Sometimes it is triage.

Meaning, when terror is everywhere, does not come from fixing the world. That is a fantasy sold to the exhausted. Meaning comes from choosing what you will not allow the world to take from you. It comes from guarding the places where love still breathes freely, even if those places are small and hidden and fiercely defended. It comes from refusing to let violence dictate the shape of your days or the tone of your spirit.

If I go into the forest, it is not to escape responsibility. It is to remember what responsibility actually is. To tend what can still be tended. To keep my capacity for care intact. To love without being constantly flayed by spectacle. In the quiet, a monster can be deliberate. She can choose who she protects. She can choose who she refuses to become.

Perhaps meaning, in a time like this, is not found in grand gestures or public endurance. Perhaps it is found in choosing each other. In choosing rest. In choosing not to become hollow in a world that rewards monstrosity. If the world is intent on becoming monstrous, then my meaning is simple and defiant: I will not become like it.

And if that makes me a monster afraid of monsters, so be it. At least I am not lying to myself.

-Z