I read this and felt the kind of silence that follows truth—

not sympathy, recognition.

I was Ed once. I wrote about it in “Dragon’s Bark” (on my Substack)—that thin hour when your body’s still here but your spirit has already started saying goodbye. There’s a point where you stop wanting to die and simply want the ache to stop echoing. That’s the difference no one sees—the exhaustion, not the end.

You’ve written the quiet between breaths, the pause where survival decides if it still wants you.

And in doing so, you’ve reminded me that staying is its own rebellion.