Light,
relative to what survives it.
Dark,
relative to what has already been lived through.
Language lies when it sharpens morality
into clean edges,
when it pretends good and evil
stand still long enough to be named.
Reality does not arrive in binaries.
It arrives bleeding,
and asks to be understood anyway.
There are worlds
where safety is a rumour,
where terror is not an interruption
but the atmosphere.
Worlds where violation
is measured against worse,
where survival is mistaken for mercy,
where rape is spoken of as light
only because darker things
have already nested in the body.
Sit with that.
Do not rush to correct it.
Do not reach for absolution.
Let the sentence ache.
I learned this reluctantly:
relative is a word some people need
in order to remain alive.
Not to justify horror,
but to ration despair.
To say,
this did not end me,
even if it should have.
And the privilege
is not in seeing the spectrum,
but in being shocked that it exists.
In being able to mourn the idea of it
instead of inhabiting its coordinates.
In having the luxury
to call something unforgivable
without calculating what comes next.
This knowledge broke something in me.
Not intellectually.
Viscerally.
It rearranged where my certainty lived.
It made my moral compass tremble
under the weight of real geography.
There are no clean mirrors here.
Only reflections warped by context,
by hunger, by war, by inherited fear,
by nights that teach children
how to disappear inside themselves.
And still,
naming relativity is not the same
as forgiving atrocity.
Understanding the spectrum
does not bleach the blood from it.
It only tells the truth
about how far some people have fallen
before they learned the word dark.
This poem does not hide.
It does not soften its own gaze.
It stands in the contradiction
until contradiction confesses.
If this is uncomfortable,
good.
Comfort has always been a narrow room.
Let morality be seen
as it actually moves:
fractured, contextual, brutal, human.
Let grief speak without tidy conclusions.
Let light and dark be honest
about what they depend on.
Some realities must be awakened,
even when the awakening
leaves no part of us untouched.
Especially then.
