it’s all a simple grammar lesson, really: trauma made home in your body
as soon as your body became
trauma is your body becoming
trauma on your body becomes
familiar & strange
through trauma, your body has become
strange

It was stranger still to look back at that poem, now years penned, years shut in a book and preserved while he burned too hot to touch it. Though he couldn't explain why, he hadn't wanted to reread his old journals. Even when he was given the means to do so with Almadel's cincher, he didn't think there was much use dwelling on his old thoughts. All the insights were carved out of them and left on the page.

The ink still looked fresh. He ran a cracked hand down the sheet, noting the texture of the parchment, the way the ink laid on the surface. He never made a habit of jabbing it down into the page, never gored his words, even when he had to use cheap ball-point pens.

He hadn't warmed up enough to burn pages back then. Strange, he thought, as he turned them now. Stranger, then, that he would come back to trauma.

He paged through more notes, more hardships. More curt phrases cutting out the quiet suffering he endured through his difficult life, all the histories of himself kept intimately hidden away lest they chance to cut him again. As he rediscovered the bloodied words he'd penned for them, he thought about how he neglected to share any of it with the people he came to love. The people he would be leaving behind knew Faustite, and they knew Eion, and one knew Elex, too; but they couldn't know him fully, missing all these contextual tragedies.

If he had to choose to whom he left all these unspoken chronicles, he would pick Kamacite without question. His loyal friend knew him the longest, and wouldn't be surprised by any of it. There would be no blindsidings to learning what happened to his mom around Christmas, or the quick dismantling of the rest of the Yorke family. He knew that Eion had to change his name, and then he would understand why the change was necessary.

But most importantly, the journals would die with him. He would breathe word of it to no one, let slip no detail, leaving Faustite's life in the dark cast by his fire.

Before he started reading, he toyed with the thought of taking these journals with him. But having heard so much about youma excision's memory loss, he doubted his next iteration would recall any of these events. With so many of the people involved now dead or disappeared, there was no living history to corroborate his recordings. And if the next Eion didn't recall any of it, wouldn't it cease to carry meaning?

So then, what gift could a journal of trauma provide without context to back it? It was better left with Kamacite, who could go over it with him when he returned to Negaverse hands. They could retrace these old paths of trauma together, where he had a chance to rekindle meaning from all these messy words.

At the bottom of the last page, after donning his cincher, he wrote his answer to the statement posed by a hand three years younger:

your body made home for trauma
as soon as trauma became
your body is becoming strange
strange becomes your body
your body is trauma
familiar & strange
Through your body, your trauma has become
familiar