Time heals all wounds, they promised,like time was a surgeon with steady hands,not a minimum-wage janitorwho sometimes shows up, sometimes doesn't,leaving the mess exactly where you left itjust covered in more dust.
What time actually does:It changes wound geography.That crater where your mother liveddoesn't fill in—it develops ecosystems.Memories grow like stubborn weedsin the places she used to stand.You learn to walk around the hole,then through it. Then you build a bridge.Then you charge tourists admissionto see the magnificent absence.
Time doesn't heal—it negotiates.Year one: the pain has squatter's rights,sets up camp in your chest,plays its music at all hours.Year three: you've learned coexistence,like living with a roommate who pays no rentbut at least does the dishes sometimes.Year ten: the pain is furniture,ugly but familiar. You'd miss itif it left, this last thingthat remembers with you.
The rape doesn't unknow itself.The accident doesn't unhappen.The words that broke you at seventeendon't unspeak themselves at forty-five—they just move from emergency broadcastto the kind of background staticyou only notice when someone asks"what's that sound?"
Time is an editor, not a healer—it revises the story, cuts scenes,changes perspective from first personto third. That girl cryingin the bathroom stall—was that you?Time makes her feel like a characteryou played once in a productionthat ran too long.
But also this: time teaches.Teaches you the topography of aftermath,which triggers to avoid, which to befriend.Teaches you that scar tissue is strongerthan original skin, less flexiblebut harder to tear. Teaches youthe difference between healedand scarred-but-functional—and that the second oneis enough. Is everything.Is the only promise time actually keeps.
Time heals all wounds?No. Time does something harder:it teaches you to carry them.To make them part of your body weight,your gravity, your strange human grace.Some days they're boulders.Some days they're wings.Most days they're justwhat you bring to the table—your proof that you survivedthe unsurvivable, that you're still here,carrying your unhealed, unhealing,completely bearable woundsthrough time.