Burden

Grief doesn’t whisper. It settles into your spine and stays there.

Artwork By Shain Parwiz

It’s not sadness.
Sadness is a passing cloud, a film you wipe off your eyes.
This isn’t that.

This is a boulder, vast, crushing, welded to my spine.
Not something I carry.
Something that became me.

I wake already pinned beneath it.
It drags behind my ribs when I try to speak.
It settles where breath used to be,
but all it feeds me is pressure.

I move through the day at angles grief designed for me.
Bent. Quiet. Heavy.
And still, somehow, functioning.

They don’t see it.
That’s the worst part.

I still show up.
Still nod, smile, fill the space with words.
But inside?
I’m holding up something that will not lift.

They call it invisible.
But I don’t believe in that anymore.

It’s in the curve and slump of my shoulders.
The way I pause mid-sentence.
The tightness behind my jaw.
The flicker that used to live behind my eyes,
gone.

Now I just look... awake.
Operational.
Like something still running, but without music.

I catch glimpses of myself in windows and flinch.
There’s no light left behind the face.
Just a flickerless screen.
Something still transmitting, but no longer alive.

I try to blink like I used to.
Even that feels like performance.

I don’t mark time in dates anymore.
I measure it in pressure.
How deep the grief has pressed itself into my posture.
How far I’ve sunk without making a sound.

And the sickest part?
I didn’t shatter.

I bent.
And bent.
And bent,
until the boulder wasn’t on my back.
It was my back.

People say I look tired.
They don’t know what it means to be structurally exhausted.
To wake up inside the wreckage
and keep walking.

There’s no moment I can point to.
No snap. No scream.
Just a slow re-formation.
Grief didn’t burn me down —
it rewrote me.

One morning, I looked in the mirror
and didn’t see a man with a burden.

I saw the boulder.
And the boulder looked like me.

I meant to post this earlier.
Teaching ran over — but I don’t break what I said I’d do.

This one isn’t loud.
But it’s still heavy.

Thank you for waiting.
Rust & Silence continues.

- Shain

If this stayed with you,there’s more.
One piece at a time. No noise. Just truth.