he looks at the calendar like a graveyard of "should have beens,"
convinced that the static has rewritten his code,
that the voices have scraped out his center
and left behind a hollow shell that doesn't fit
the blueprint of a normal life.
he tells me he is a structural failure,
a bridge that collapsed under the weight of its own transmission.
but he is reading the schematics upside down.
he thinks the dented metal is proof of ruin,
but i look at all he is and see a vault.
he thinks he’s broken because the engine is loud—
because the gears have scars where the fire took hold,
but a broken thing doesn't keep time in a storm.
a broken thing doesn't hold its breath
until the room gets safe enough to collapse.
he is Unbroken in the way he guards his own wreckage.
the voices told him he would be a casualty by now,
a forgotten frequency lost to the grey.
yet here he is, dampening my sweatshirt with his gravity,
a monument of pure grit in a tailored suit.
he has survived a war that happened entirely in the dark,
fought a phantom that knew his name and his weaknesses,
and he is Unbroken because his hands still reach for mine—
even when they are shaking too hard to hold the cup.
that isn't a malfunction.
that is the definition of Unbroken.
it is the iron that remains when the wood burns away.
it is the data that outlasts the system crash.
he thinks he is a ghost haunting his own skin,
but ghosts don't have a pulse this stubborn,
and they don't leave a bruise of raw gold
when they hold onto you for dear life.
the world wants to label him by the cracks in the glass,
by the screaming on the dial that he can't switch off.
they want the highlight reel, the smooth finish,
the easy mathematics of a person who never had to bleed
just to keep their feet on the floor.
but i am throwing out the old metrics.
you are not a ruined machine—
you are Unbroken in the way you refuse to stop running;
even when the oil turned to ash.
you are here, whole and Unbroken in spite of
every simulation that predicted your end.
you are the "yes" that the static couldn't swallow.
so let the static scream its bitter lies into the corner.
let the monsters count the pieces you lost along the way.
they don't understand that the remaining parts
are an Unbroken line forged out of something the fire couldn't melt.
you are not the aftermath—
you are the Unbroken survivor standing in the clearing.
your past is not a sentence of ruin—
it is a string of victories you are too tired to count.
every heavy breath you take
is an Unbroken promise to the morning.
look at how the fractured edges meet under my hands.
they are not failures of the glass;
they are the notches, the seams, the deliberate map
of an Unbroken mosaic holding itself together in the sun.
the light isn't slipping through your cracks—
it is being held by them, framed in raw gold,
proving that a mosaic is just an Unbroken way of being whole.
stay right here.
breathe without permission.
you are a living, breathing miracle
of spite and survival,
and you are completely,
magnificently,
Unbroken.