We sign nothing on paper.
We take oaths
the way frost takes a field—
overnight,
inevitable,
leaving no corner untouched.
We learn the grammar of dirt and wire,
how to speak quietly to distance,
how patience can be a weapon
and still be mercy.
We are not loud.
We do not look for witnesses.
Work is the witness.
Time changes the rules while we are still obeying them.
The sky grows eyes.
The ground learns to move without breath.
Hands that once steadied heartbeats
are told to step back,
five feet an eternity,
and a machine whispers now
with more certainty than faith.
We shrink in this moment—
not from fear,
but from irrelevance.
A craft honed since youth
folded into a button press,
and the long conversation between us and distance
ends without goodbye.
When the body finally refuses the argument,
metal is driven through bone
like a signature meant to last.
We leave with our names still on the hooks,
helmets watching the door,
as if we’d only stepped out for air.
Then comes the silence that roars.
News arrives dressed as catastrophe.
Maps betray us.
We count ghosts before we knew their names were safe.
We starve.
We pray to refresh buttons.
We punish ourselves like saints
who no longer believe
but still know how to kneel.
And then—
the old trick.
The door left open on purpose.
The enemy stepping into certainty
that was never theirs.
The quiet ones returned,
this time without bodies at all—
only intent,
only patience reborn as code and rotor and tread.
The trap closes.
History blinks.
Pride chokes on its own echo.
What should not have been possible
is done without applause.
We then stand elsewhere,
split clean down the soul,
half of us pacing a foreign floor,
half of us still holding the line
that needs not hands like yours or mine.
They call.
We don’t answer.
Not because we don’t love them—
but because some bonds
complete themselves only by being released.
Because staying would mean pretending
we are still useful
in the way we need to be.
A charter is not revoked when we leave.
It lives on in restraint,
in knowing when not to return,
in trusting that the work
will continue without our shadows.
If they remember us,
let it be as those
who did the job
and knew when the job was done.
And if they don’t—
that’s fine too.
Some signatures are meant
to fade into the page
while the meaning holds.