Survive

[undated]

Sorrow does not stay sorrow forever.
If it is ignored long enough, it hollows itself out.

At first it hurts. Then it dulls. Then it stops asking for anything at all.

I see it in people who no longer complain. They mistake silence for strength. They say they have “accepted things.” What they mean is that expectation has been amputated. They move through their days efficiently, politely, without resistance. There is nothing left to argue with.

They wake up without dread and without anticipation. The absence of pain convinces them they are healed. They do not notice that the absence of desire has come with it.

They still laugh. That confuses them. Laughter remains because it is reflexive. A muscle memory. It does not require presence. It does not require hope. It fires and fades, leaving no residue.

This is emptiness: not despair, but weightlessness.

They are relieved when they feel nothing. Feeling had demanded too much. Feeling had led to disappointment. Feeling had made them vulnerable to loss. Emptiness feels safer. Cleaner. There is nothing left to be taken.

They stop imagining futures. The future becomes logistics. Appointments. Obligations. Maintenance. They plan just enough to avoid collapse. Anything more would require investment, and investment risks disappointment.

They stop mourning what they have lost because mourning requires belief that something mattered. Instead, they tell themselves it was inevitable. That everything unfolds as it must. This belief comforts them. It removes responsibility for grief.

I watch them look at old photographs without reaction. Not sadness. Not nostalgia. Just distance. As if the person in the image were someone they once studied, briefly, and then forgot.

Memory becomes archival rather than lived.

They still care, technically. About children. About routines. About appearances. But the caring is procedural. Performed correctly. Checked off. It no longer costs them anything.

When people reach this stage, they are praised. They are called calm. Mature. Grounded. Others envy their composure. No one asks what it took to achieve it.

No one asks what had to be surrendered.

I recognize it because it feels familiar. The mind simplifies itself when sorrow becomes too heavy. It removes color. It narrows focus. It reduces everything to function.

This is not peace. Peace has texture. This is absence.

In emptiness, morality fades quietly. Not because of malice, but because caring requires energy. Judgment requires investment. Intervention requires belief that outcomes matter.

When nothing matters deeply, nothing is defended fiercely.

They call this neutrality. They call it balance. They call it being realistic. It is none of those things. It is resignation disguised as wisdom.

I write to prove to myself that something still registers. That words still land somewhere. Even if they land in a hollow space, the act of marking it matters.

Emptiness is seductive because it does not argue. It does not demand. It does not accuse. It simply allows time to pass.

Time passes very easily here.

This is how lives end long before bodies do. Not with tragedy, but with thinning. With subtraction. With the quiet agreement to stop asking whether existence should feel heavier than this.

They survive.

They do not live.