Veins Of Gold

The world will try to stain you. It will press its weight onto your skin, into your bones, seeping its rot into every open wound. It will tell you that suffering is a cycle—pain begets pain, harm breeds harm, and the broken only know how to break.

But there are those who refuse.

Not by innocence, not by ignorance, but by an unrelenting choice: to let the world carve through them without becoming what carved them. To stand in the wreckage and not be wrecked. To take in the brutality, the betrayal, the corrosion of all things soft and sacred—and still, somehow, remain.

There is nothing naive about this. It is not passive or gentle. It is a war waged in silence, in shadows, in the unseen spaces where the soul makes its choices. The choice to not harden. The choice to not return violence with violence. The choice to hold onto something incorruptible when everything around you decays.

The wounds are real. The scars are deep. But where others let the poison in, let it curdle their hearts, let it twist them into reflections of the very things they swore to resist—you do not. You let the pain move through, but not settle. You let the fire pass over, but not consume.

And in the broken places, gold runs through.

Not because suffering makes you holy, but because you never let it make you less than whole. Because no matter what the world did to you, it did not win.