Each morning the man reported to the same invisible tribunal,
though no summons had ever arrived.
Still, he understood he was already guilty.
Of insufficient strength.
Of excessive feeling.
Of failing to transform exhaustion
into something presentable.
The corridors were endless there.
Long offices lit by a sickly yellow light.
Clerks with clean fingernails
recording his smallest confessions.
He once admitted loneliness.
They stamped the document
weakness.
He once confessed to tiredness,
quietly, as though apologising for a crime already committed.
The officials exchanged glances.
Some notation was added to the file.
Manipulation, they wrote.
Emotional coercion.
After that, even his silences
were treated as accusations.
Later he spoke truthfully about grief,
and the walls themselves seemed embarrassed for him.
Someone coughed.
Someone closed a ledger.
No one looked him in the eye again.
After that he learned procedure.
A man must drag himself through life
without allowing the chains to make noise.
He must bleed internally.
He must decay in private.
He must smile with precision.
And above all
he must never describe the machinery
while it is still operating inside him.
But sometimes, late at night,
he suspects the trial was never meant to end.
That the punishment
is not for failing to become enough,
but for noticing
that no amount of suffering
would ever have been enough at all.
