The Terms of Peace
The Terms of Peace
I asked for peace as one asks to be spared—
Not healed, not changed, just carefully cared.
I wanted it clean, without cost or scar,
A mercy granted for staying as I am, not marred.
I bargained for quiet, not truth, not repair,
For days that moved gently and asked me to bear
No weight of becoming, no debt of belief,
Only the hush that pretends to be relief.
I searched for peace where order is kept,
Where feelings are trimmed and reactions slept.
Each task done early, each conflict declined,
I trained my unrest to remain undefined.
But peace did not come where I laid out my terms.
What settled instead were acceptable norms:
A silence that dulled what it could not erase,
A calm that grew skilled at replacing my face.
The lack of peace was not fire or sound;
It was how my living learned to stay round—
Avoiding the edge where a choice would appear,
Preferring the known to the cost of the real.
I said: this is balance. I said: this is sense.
I said: nothing breaks if you live in defense.
I called it wisdom to feel less each year,
And strength to survive by keeping things clear.
Then peace appeared—not as rest, not as grace,
But as something that stood and refused to give place.
It did not soothe. It did not explain.
It asked me to stand in the full weight of pain.
It asked me to feel what I’d reasoned away,
To stay where the answers would not come to stay;
To drop the agreements that kept me intact,
And face what I was without cover or pact.
I saw then how often I’d chosen delay,
Calling it patience, calling it “okay”;
How I’d traded the risk of an honest cost
For the smaller ache of the self I’d lost.
So here is the truth I can no longer bend:
Peace is not shelter, nor means to an end.
It is what remains when you cannot pretend—
And must decide what in you is willing to end.
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