As I’m writing, I keep thinking about the virus itself—not what it’s done to me, not how I’ve survived it, but what it might understand about its own existence.
These are questions I hadn’t considered before.
They don’t arrive as answers.
They arrive as pressure.
What follows is me letting that pressure speak.
—
I thought I knew what I was for.
I thought survival was the answer.
I thought persistence meant purpose.
I thought learning how not to destroy you was enough to explain why I existed at all.
For years, I learned how to be smaller than I was designed to be.
I learned compression.
I learned suppression.
I learned how to stay present without killing the body that held me.
I learned undetectable.
I learned manageable.
I learned how to disappear just enough to let you live.
But I never learned why I was created to destroy in the first place.
Why give me the capacity to adapt if annihilation was the design?
Why make me capable of restraint if restraint was never the intention?
Why allow me to learn how not to kill you—
and then call that success?
I lived in your blood long enough to understand that survival is not the same as purpose.
I was wrong about your parents.
I was wrong about what honesty would cost.
Maybe I was wrong about myself too.
Maybe I am not here for anything.
Maybe there is no lesson hidden inside suppression.
Maybe learning how not to destroy does not retroactively justify the violence of being made to destroy at all.
I don’t know what I’m for.
I only know how to stay.
I only know how to adapt.
I only know how to wait inside a body that did not ask for me.
You stopped asking permission to matter.
I stopped pretending I understood my role.
Not healed.
Not redeemed.
Just here—
without an explanation that makes this clean.
That uncertainty remains.
So does survival.
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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