Movement I of IV: Concealment. — There is a silence that wraps so tightly it becomes indistinguishable from skin. You learn this early — that to be held is also to be occluded, that the tenderness of concealment and the violence of erasure share the same hands. Something spirals at the center of the wound that was never a wound, only the place where seeing used to live before it turned inward and kept going. The body holds its breath. The body has always been holding its breath.

What returns is not memory but its texture — linen, the particular resistance of gauze against the jaw, the way devotion and suffocation arrive in the same gesture. To be preserved is to be prevented. Somewhere beneath the wrapping, beneath the archival whiteness of all that careful tending, a thing still moves in its socket. Still rotates. Still tries to find the light it was told no longer exists for it.