Recursive Silence

The body remembers what language cannot touch. Skin as archive, muscle as memory, a topography of suspended breaths.

Compliance is a kind of underwater drowning. Quiet. Barely perceptible. You learn to breathe without moving, to exist in the narrow margin between submission and survival.

Institutional walls have no colour. They absorb everything: your hesitations, your unspoken negotiations, the microscopic capitulations that accumulate like dust. Who teaches us to become transparent? To render ourselves so slight that we nearly vanish?

Fragments accumulate: A gesture swallowed, A boundary folded inward, Silence as a protective architecture

The nervous system knows. It registers what the mind refuses to acknowledge, those electrical tremors, those subterranean signals that pulse beneath performative calm.

You develop strategies. Techniques of disappearance. How to be present without being seen. How to comply without consenting. The body as a negotiation, always in process, always contingent.

Shame is not a feeling. It's a landscape. Terrain without landmarks, where every movement is both retreat and revelation.

Memory doesn't work like film. More like water. Fluid. Permeable. Condensing around certain temperatures of hurt. Dispersing. Reforming.

The systems that contain us are not external. They live inside the musculature, the hesitations, the reflexive apologies. Embedded. Recursive. Self-generating.

Who teaches us to become our own surveillance? To internalise the gaze that disciplines, that flattens, that transforms living tissue into compliant surface?

Stillness is not peace. It is a form of holding. A negotiation. A temporary truce between what is felt and what is permitted.

And here: a breath. Unresolved. Hanging.