The Curse | The Funeral You Attend Alone | YTHRAL©

There is a version of you that died and no one attended the funeral. Not even you. Especially not you.

They ask what The Curse is. As though naming it will soften it. As though language has ever tamed anything that bleeds.

You didn't bury the body. You simply learned how to walk while carrying the corpse inside you.

There is a cost to becoming. No one tells you this. They celebrate the result — the jaw, the composure, the silence that commands a room. They admire the architecture. They never ask about the demolition.

But every building that stands was once a structure that had to fall. And the rubble does not disappear simply because something beautiful was erected on top of it. It remains. Buried. Breathing. Rotting slowly beneath the foundation of everything you now call yourself.

That rot — that quiet, permanent decay beneath the surface — is The Curse.

It is not your weakness. Weakness is what they saw before, when you were still soft enough to be punctured. Weakness is what they exploited with precision and then blamed you for having.

It is not your strength. Strength is the performance. Strength is the version of you that enters rooms and exits negotiations. Strength is the mask they applaud. Strength is what you built on top of The Curse to ensure no one ever discovers it.

The Curse is neither. The Curse is what lives in the space between the person you buried and the person you became. It belongs to neither one. It answers to no name. It simply is — the way a scar simply is. Not the wound. Not the healing. The permanent record that both occurred.

You want to understand it? Then stop looking at the man who survived. Look at what he left at the door to survive.

There was a version of you — do you remember? — that believed the world would be fair if you were good enough. That version extended hands without counting fingers. That version bled openly because it believed honesty was currency. That version trusted the architecture of kindness, not knowing the building was condemned from the day it was built.

That version is dead.

Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Functionally dead. You conducted the funeral yourself. Quietly. Without witnesses. You buried it in a place no one will ever find — not because you are ashamed, but because the grave is the only thing in this world that is entirely, irrevocably yours.

The Curse is the funeral you attend every night and speak of to no one.

They have a word for what you became. Several, in fact. They rotate them depending on the context — cold, guarded, intense, intimidating, distant. They file you under categories that make them comfortable. They do not say damaged. They say different. They do not say hollowed. They say strong....

The Curse is the name they gave you without knowing they were naming a wound.

And the cruelty of it — the exquisite, surgical cruelty — is that the name fits. It fits perfectly. Because the wound is the identity now. You cannot separate the scar from the skin. You cannot remove The Curse without removing the person it built. You are the house and the rubble. The mask and the absence beneath it. The living and the funeral, simultaneously.

Do not mistake this for empowerment.

The Curse is not a gift wrapped in suffering. It is not a lesson with a moral. There is no redemption arc hidden in the margins, no sunrise waiting at the end of the paragraph. There is only the cost. And the cost is this:

You changed. And the change was not free.

It was purchased with something you did not know you were spending until the receipt arrived. Your capacity for softness. Your ability to trust without calculation. The version of your laugh that once required no rehearsal. The part of you that could love without building an exit strategy into the blueprint.

Gone. Not suppressed. Not hidden. Spent. The way fuel is spent — converted into motion and heat, leaving behind only exhaust and silence.

The Curse is the exhaust. The Curse is the silence.

And here is where the knife twists deepest:

You do not regret it.

That is the true horror. Not the loss — the acceptance of the loss. The quiet, settled certainty that the sacrifice was necessary. That the person who died inside you had to die so that the person standing here could stand at all. You do not mourn them. You cannot afford to. Mourning requires softness, and softness is the first thing The Curse consumed.

So you carry it. Not like a burden — burdens can be set down. You carry it like a skeleton carries its own bones. Structurally. Permanently. Without the option of removal.

They will never know.

That is the final clause of The Curse. The silence. You cannot speak of it — not because the words do not exist, but because speaking would require you to open the one door you sealed shut with your own hands. And behind that door is not pain. Behind that door is the person who felt the pain. And that person's face looks too much like yours before the world taught you what you know now.

So you wear it.

You wear the Facade — because the truth is an autopsy report, and no one reads those at dinner.

You wear the Obsidian — because the shade they adore is the exact colour of everything they destroyed.

And you walk forward. Composed. Admired. Respected. Feared.

Completely, immaculately alone in the knowledge of what it cost.

The Curse is not what was done to you.
The Curse is what you had to become because of it.
And the cruelest part —
you survive.
That is the punishment.

I close this book now. But The Curse does not end on paper. It ends nowhere. That is the point.

For when you see the sigil — on the cotton, on the skin, on the silence of someone who understands — you are not looking at a brand. You are looking at a contract. Signed in sacrifice. Sealed in shade. Worn by those who paid the price the world pretends was never owed.

The Curse is yours. It always was.