Shame begins with a clean sheet.
It wakes before the owner and settles as a cold stain on the chest. This is not the repentance of a sinner - it is something far worse: the physiological reaction of one who has remained intact. In a world where matter is falling to pieces, wholeness looks like looting. A hot shower is the appropriation of someone else's water. A peaceful sleep is desertion.
Any living body is illicit property.
Textbooks call this a syndrome and offer treatment. But it is not a disease. It is the only honest response an organism can make to the absurdity of its own survival.
The imitation of life has become the primary skill. You can sit at a table, eat, laugh in the right places, and hold a glass so that the hand does not give you away. But inside, a different map is always open. On it are the coordinates of the front, the distance to the explosion, and a countdown for those who will not live until morning, while the wine goes down. This is the new topography of consciousness: to live on two maps at once and pretend that only one exists.
The woman who knew how to dissolve in joy stayed behind in the time before 2022. She was too naive for this gravity. Now the knowledge of one's own vulnerability is stitched into the muscles. It is a fact admitted: the former lightness has become impossible.
You can try to turn this shame into a virtue, telling yourself that pain proves your humanity and that the crack inside is a sign of belonging. That is the more beautiful story.
The truth is uglier: the body goes on living. It wants to eat, to sleep, to take pleasure, without asking permission from those who can no longer feel anything. Real shame is not moral. It is physiological. It is shame for the cells that go on dividing while other people's fly apart together with the concrete.
This state will not pass after victory. It has soaked into the structure of the self - a habit of holding this absurdity inside and not stopping. The body does not ask whether you are ready. It simply goes on breathing, because it knows no other way.