Still
This.. is the Stillness. An absence mistaken for peace. It does not strike, nor spread, nor warn. Rather, it arrives as a soft refusal—of joy, of hunger, of memory. Not abrupt, but gradual. One ceases to find pleasure in a song. Then forgets it altogether. The warmth drains from the hands, the light from the eyes, and somewhere beneath the skin, the will to persist begins to unravel. Its signs vary. In some, it’s the fading of pigment—in hair, in voice, in breath. In others, the silence begins inside the mind: a thinning of thought, a dulling of inner color. There is no single symptom. Only a growing quiet.
They will describe it as “neurotransmitter” depletion. They will speak of war fatigue, of systemic despair. But the Stillness resists definition. It is not illness.. nor disease. It is the slow relinquishing of one’s claim to aliveness.
And yet, the Stillness manifests itself in a myriad of ways. In some, not so visibly. In others, a complete depletion of life.
There are those whose vibrancy holds. Their blood remains vivid, their voices undiminished. They live nearer to the soil, some say—closer to the rhythm of the world, untouched by the depletion that afflicts the rest. In desperation, others begin to believe they are hoarding something vital. “Stealing” it. Thriving at the expense of those decaying.
A lie.
The Stillness is not stolen. It is yielded. It is the body answering a question no one remembers asking: Must I continue? And the body says: No. You may rest. You may forget.
It is not death. But it is a quiet agreement to stop insisting on life.
And with such agreement, the terms lead to the finality of it all.
They will tell you the war began with a breach. A border crossed, a treaty broken, a people wronged. But that is not where it began.
It began long before—with a splitting. Not of nations, but of thought. Two peoples, once alike, grew apart not by blood but by belief. One sought harmony with the land, tending it as kin. The other sought dominion, mastering it as resource. They did not quarrel at first. They agreed to part ways. Equal lands were drawn, each with soil rich enough to feed generations.
But harmony is not efficient. It does not multiply on command. And so, as the years passed, one side flourished steadily while the other consumed rapidly, stripping its earth bare in pursuit of more. Crops failed. Waters dried. And the people, pale with Stillness, looked beyond their borders and saw abundance.
They asked: Why do they have what we lack?
They answered: Because they have taken it.
And that lie—soothing in its simplicity—became policy.
The war that followed was not declared, not at first. It began with murmurs. Laws. Sanctions. Quiet displacements. Words like “balance” and “survival” masked the truth: one side had ruined its own ground and would rather steal than repent.
Propaganda bloomed like rot. The thriving race was recast as devourers, parasites, enemies of the natural order. And the Stillness, now epidemic among the privileged, was no longer a consequence of excess—but a theft of life.
And so they marched. Not to conquer, but to reclaim what was never theirs. They called it a reckoning. A return to order. They called it necessary.
But it was a war of envy. Of fear disguised as justice. Of ruin mistaken for righteousness.
The land always remembers.
Such lies made them forget.
That in the beginning, they were of the same blood. Kin lost to competition. A brother, bent not by cruelty but by hunger—by the terror that he had been given less. That the ground beneath his feet could no longer love him. And when he saw his sibling still thriving—still loved—he mistook that sight for betrayal.
A brother, jealous of his own kin, for their abundance was a threat to his created insufficiency.
In that resentment, he does not seek justice—he seeks erasure. For even the memory of his brother becomes unbearable. Perhaps, he believes, the blood of his brother would be enough to suffice. To bring peace. Is a massacre enough to put the mind at rest?
Desire becomes entitlement. Entitlement becomes fear. Fear becomes law. And law, once agreed upon, becomes execution.