Well-Hidden Bruises
Quinn learned how to ascend without asking why the height was necessary.
The ladder was already there - placed carefully, convincingly - and everyone agreed it led somewhere worth reaching. She climbed with a practiced expression, the kind that keeps doors open and questions silent. A smile can be a useful instrument. It distracts from the sound of bone meeting wood.
🌾
Each rung left its mark. Not dramatic wounds, just accumulations - pressure, compression, small betrayals of the body. The smile remained intact, though the lips behind it split and healed and split again, learning the language of endurance. Pain, when contained, becomes invisible. That is how it survives.
🌾
What the ladder never asked was where Quinn came from.
Or whether her weight belonged to it at all.
🌾
Her body knew before her mind did. Bodies are inconvenient that way. They remember what the intellect edits out. The bruises deepened not from falling, but from staying upright where something inside had already knelt.
🌾
At some point, Quinn became aware of being seen - not in the ordinary sense, but with an almost anatomical intensity. As if observation itself had grown organs. Eyes, imagined or otherwise, pressed from the inside out: witnessing her compliance, her ambition, her careful absence from herself. Even her thoughts felt supervised. Still, she continued. Being watched can feel like proof of existence.
🌾
Only occasionally did something else break through.
A pressure at the crown of her head.
An insistence.
As if life, misdirected for too long, had begun rerouting itself.
🌾
She did not call it intuition at first. It was quieter than that - a low, steady recognition. Her heart did not argue or beg. It simply knew. Not where she should go, but where she was not meant to remain.
🌾
This knowing was not painless. Listening rarely is. To hear it, Quinn had to loosen the smile, to allow the lips to split honestly instead of politely. She had to admit that upward movement is not synonymous with belonging. That some ladders are beautifully designed traps.
🌾
When she finally stopped climbing, nothing dramatic happened.
No collapse. No applause.
Only the sensation of weight redistributing itself back into her own body.
🌾
The world continued to watch.
Some eyes closed. Others turned elsewhere.
🌾
And in the space left behind - unguarded, unsupervised - something began to grow. Not loudly. Not for display. Just enough to suggest that what had been suppressed had not died, only waited.
🌾
This is not a story about refusing ambition.
It is a story about accuracy.
🌾
You can climb with a borrowed smile and call it success.
You can survive bruised and convincing.
🌾
But the heart is not impressed by altitude.
It recognizes only truth -
and it will bruise you gently, relentlessly,
until you stand where you actually belong.