Pain is the season that never migrates— its roots vein through basalt, a slow syllable of magma hardening into alphabet. I become cartographer of fractures: each crevasse sings in ultraviolet, a hymn only glaciers comprehend. Night unspools its black origami, folding shadows into origami cranes that pierce my ribcage. Their wings are stamped with vanished postcodes, letters I never sent dissolving like aspirin on a fossil's tongue. The body keeps ledger: every scar an hourglass counting backward to some silent detonation. We name this arithmetic memory— but what breathes in the negative space between bone and its ghost? I press my ear to the wall of the world. Through limestone throats echo the unspoken isotopes— half-life of a sob trapped in amber, a prehistoric insect still beating iridescent wings against the resin of almost, not yet, never quite. Beneath skin’s parchment, rivers chart their cursive grief, carving canyons where light learns to refract in first person. Pain, that relentless geologist— polishing sediment until we see our own strata glow.