This piece did not begin where it ends.
It began with me avoiding the center while telling myself I was being careful. I built structure as a way to manage proximity. I shortened language not for clarity, but for safety. Long before I was willing to let the work speak plainly, I kept redirecting it.
There were three different entry points for 26 → 13. I wrote each one with conviction. Each one failed. Not because the sentences were wrong, but because they kept the truth at a distance I still needed.
I was diagnosed in 2010, at a moment when treatment had already shifted the prognosis from crisis to management.
That opening relied on history and medical fluency. It positioned me as informed, competent, already stabilized. It explained the context responsibly, but it also placed me outside the experience itself. History became a buffer. Safety disguised itself as clarity.
Every morning begins the same way. A pill. A glass of water. A body learning how to cooperate.
This version moved closer to the body. It entered routine, discipline, the choreography of survival. But it aestheticized endurance just enough to make it manageable. It treated survival as something already integrated, already resolved.
For 15 years, I have lived with something I learned how to abbreviate before I ever learned how to name.
This opening assumed arrival. It spoke from reflection, from a vantage point that suggested understanding had already been secured. The calm in that sentence was premature. Writing from resolution allowed me to skip the part I was still negotiating.
What finally shifted the piece was not a better sentence. It was a decision. I stopped relocating the center.
The closing note I had written to myself months earlier was never meant to be public. It wasn’t written to persuade or contextualize. It was language without audience, written to hold something steady rather than shape it. Each time I tried to place it at the end—as conclusion, as reflection—it resisted. It didn’t want to arrive. It wanted to live inside the body of the work.
The opening that held did not explain itself. It did not offer history, routine, or reflection. It spoke from inside the thing I had been managing.
For a long time, you had language for everything except me.
You built sentences around me. You learned how to manage me. You learned how to live with me without ever letting my full name touch your mouth.
For 15 years, you used what was shorter. Safer. 3 letters that could sit inside a sentence without changing its temperature. 13 you were taught to trust. Language that made other people relax.
That voice was not metaphor. It was not distance. It was witness.
When I reread those lines, I understood why nothing else had worked. The essay didn’t need an opening that oriented the reader. It needed one that refused to look away. The voice of the virus wasn’t commentary or device—it was the only position that could hold the truth without managing it.
That was the entry.
And once I let it speak, it became the through-line.
Sections fell away. Explanations became unnecessary. Silence started doing more work than commentary. I no longer needed the voice to justify its presence.
The images went through the same process.
Some were too literal. Some aestheticized rupture instead of honoring it. A few were beautiful but wrong—composed from distance rather than recognition. I kept testing them against the text, not asking which image looked best, but which one refused to explain.
The cover I chose didn’t resolve anything. It held tension without commentary. A figure between light and shadow. No declaration. No instruction. Just presence.
That restraint finally matched what the essay had learned to do.
What didn’t survive this process matters as much as what did.
I cut metaphors I loved because they performed intelligence instead of truth. I removed passages that explained silence instead of letting it bruise. I shortened sections where I could feel myself managing the reader’s response.
What remains is leaner, but heavier. Less generous, maybe. More exact.
This fragment exists because the labor matters. Not as confession. Not as explanation. As record.
This is what it looked like before the center held.
26 → 13 carries what survived. This fragment holds the scaffolding that had to be dismantled to let it stand.
UNSPUN publishes short/longform essays, op-eds, and visual documents tracing the language of power in real time. This piece appears in Fragments, the column for thoughts caught mid-spark—where language arrives before it hardens into essay, and interior truth meets cultural witness.
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