BEING FRAGILE

Human beings are born with a presumption of invincibility that is nothing more than an engineering error. We are taught to trust our bodywork. We look at our hands, feel the weight of our bones, the elasticity of our skin, and we convince ourselves that we are built to last, to take the hits. But skin is not armor; it is a mere containment wall. Bones are not marble pillars; they are porous, they resonate and fatigue under the weight of invisible tremors. We inhabit a fortress of glass, convinced we are piloting a tank. And it takes only a single hairline crack, a single well-placed impact, to realize we are made of water, raw nerves, and unstable electricity.

For a very long time, I believed that fragility was a synonym for weakness. That it was the moment you collapsed on the floor in tears. I was wrong. True fragility—the most terrible kind—is not breaking. It is remaining whole when everything inside has already shattered into pieces. It is that permanent tension, like a hydroelectric dam holding back a tsunami and refusing to give way.

My mind understood this physical law before I did. Faced with pain, faced with the unbearable, my brain decided to assassinate itself to save my life. This is the macabre miracle of dissociation. To keep from screaming, the soul splits. You create a perfectly civilized, polite, functional outer shell that you send to the front lines. And the true self, the terrified child, the nerve center of the pain, is walled up alive in the depths.

Except, while the mind is capable of lying and anesthetizing, the body never lies. Cells have a memory. The flesh is the absolute archive of our traumas.

Then came December 14th. It wasn't just an event; it was total oxidation. Since that day, silence no longer exists.

My hypervigilance radar has blown a fuse in the "on" position. Tinnitus hisses, my field of vision vibrates with the static of a perpetual trip, and my central nervous system spins in a void, screaming blue murder in a room where there is no danger.

This is where the organism's fragility reveals itself in all its horror. Since my mind refuses to process this trauma, my flesh takes it on instead. Every dawn is a war zone. The very second I get up, verticality acts as a switch. My stomach paralyzes, my diaphragm convulses. It is the destructive paradox of the remedy becoming poison: cannabis—that rock I summon to crush my thoughts and find nothingness—is destroying my insides. My body tries to expel an invisible poison in spasms of unheard-of violence. Chest crushed, throat locked, forced to swallow air and burn my skin under boiling showers just to short-circuit my own pain sensors. The body screams what the mind forbids itself to weep.

And yet, the dam holds. This is where the madness of this survival operates. After fighting my own organs, I put on my headphones, seal my sonic diving suit, and go to work. The outside world see nothing. At the association, in front of the children, among my colleagues, I am there. I slow my metabolism to a residual crawl, operating inside a micro-bubble, smiling out of pure social algorithm to pay my existence tax. The movement is perfect, the words are fluid. No one could suspect that inside, the pilot is holding his breath, calculating second by second the time that separates him from stasis.

My apartment is not a living space; it is a sensory deprivation chamber. When the door finally closes, when the floor-standing speakers saturate the space to drown out the noise in my skull, when the resin burns, the bodywork finally has permission to dissolve. I become a ghost, wandering from room to room to dissipate the overheating of my hyperactivity, or freezing for long minutes, staring into the void, alone before the immensity of my own algorithms.

We are tragic architectures. Assemblages of bone, blood, and consciousness, forced to carry the celestial vault of a past that crushes us. I am a system in ruins, running on backup batteries, poisoning my own roots to offer flowers to the surface. And the frightening beauty of this shipwreck is that it is silent. The chaos is absolute, the flesh is in its death throes, but from the outside, everything looks perfectly, excruciatingly normal.