A tiny splinter pierces your skin. If you leave it alone, your body will accept it as part of you. New flesh gently grows over it, capillaries make way for it and then quietly wind around it, and white blood cells stop charging at it. Day after day, deep where you cannot see, it settles in and signs a silent pact with your flesh and blood.
Years later, when you try to pull it out, it will inevitably tear through sinew, bone, and flesh, leaving blood everywhere.
It turns out some things do not grow into you. You grow into them. Separation never means both sides are even. It is a brutal dissection of the years you spent living as one. The skin will heal, and the pain will fade, but beneath that tiny wound, a small patch of flesh will remain forever, once made ready for a particular splinter and never able to return to what it was.
When something pierces your life, it is destined to take a part of you with it when it leaves.
