The Weight of Stillness

“Sometimes the hardest part isn’t the crisis—it’s what comes after, when there's nothing left to do but feel.”

Kneeling beside Jamie, the world outside the tent receded into a blur of distant wind and colourless light, leaving me cocooned in a silence that hovered between comfort and desolation. The filtered stillness within this fragile canvas shelter offered no escape from the weight pressing down on my chest. Without the urgency of action, without the distraction of pain to mend or tasks to complete, I felt the edges of my composure begin to fray.

Here, in the aftermath of crisis, the emotional scaffolding I’d relied on for so long—clinical detachment, focus, resilience—began to buckle under the pressure. My shoulders sagged. My breathing slowed. And then, without permission or warning, a single tear slid down my cheek, its path searing as it caught the edge of my mouth. I wiped it away instinctively, but another followed. Then another.

The sting in my arm from Duke’s bite still pulsed in the background, a dull throb that now seemed symbolic of everything I was trying to contain. My head ached from more than just dehydration or fatigue—it throbbed with the ache of grief deferred, of fears unspoken, of choices made without the time to reflect on their true cost.

I folded into myself, arms wrapping tightly around my middle, as if by doing so I might hold together what little was left of my strength. The fabric of my shirt was damp beneath my touch, the tension in my muscles taut as a bowstring, threatening to snap.

And then I broke.

A sob—deep, guttural—tore through me, loud and unrestrained, echoing in the quiet space like a rupture. It was the kind of sound that came from the soul, not the throat. A release I would have never allowed back in the hospital, never permitted in the company of colleagues or patients. But here, in Clivilius, there was no performance to uphold, no familiar hallway to retreat down in search of privacy.

The tent didn’t offer shelter from the enormity of it all. Instead, it magnified the truth.

There was no Pierre here to hear my cries. No comforting hand. No whispered assurance in the middle of a long, exhausted night. No shared silence in the aftermath of a trauma or a weary laugh over a cup of hospital vending machine coffee.

Not this time.

My sobs came slower now, softer, until they were barely more than tremors in my chest. The air was still. Jamie stirred slightly beside me, murmuring something incoherent in his sleep, but did not wake.

I pressed my palm to my forehead, trying to steady the tremble in my hand. But even as the tide of emotion ebbed, it left in its wake a chilling truth that settled like ash over my thoughts.

I am alone.

The realisation wasn’t sudden, but it struck with the cold precision of a scalpel. And it didn’t matter that Luke had just been here, or that Paul was nearby working on a tent. In the spaces that truly mattered—the ones filled with memory, with connection, with home—I was alone in a world that did not yet know me.

And I did not yet know it.