Damages: Part Four – No Clear Devil

There wasn’t a villain. There was a pattern I couldn’t escape.

Not every wound has a villain.
Some pain is born from patterns that never resolved…
From people who didn’t mean to hurt you…
From systems that weren’t built to hold your shape.

That’s the part no one wants to hear.
We want our pain to have names.
To blame someone.
To cast a role.

But the truth is…
Some damage comes from collisions.
From too many inputs all hitting at once.
From being told two opposite things by people you trusted… and having no place to put the contradiction.

That’s what C-PTSD feels like for me.
It’s not one moment.
It’s every moment stacked sideways.
It’s a memory of being safe… tinted slightly wrong.
It’s affection that tasted like copper.
It’s being held while your body still flinches.
It’s the color blue trying to be yellow and turning gray instead.

There was no single act of betrayal.
Just hundreds of unresolved signals.
People who were kind… and unpredictable.
Words that said you’re safe while tone said you’re a burden.
Hands that soothed… but only if I stayed still.

It builds slow.
C-PTSD doesn’t announce itself.
It learns your shape from the inside, and then scrambles your ability to trust your own response.
It makes you question every reaction, every instinct.
It makes you wonder if you’re the threat.

This part of Damages lives in the unstable structures.
Drums that feel confident one second, and then collapse into reverb the next.
Lyrics that don’t resolve… because they’re still trying to process something that never made sense.

There’s a line in Fragments that says:

I learned to breathe with all my fragments talking shit…
I learned to breathe with no clear devil in the middle.

That’s it.
That’s the entire landscape of this kind of trauma.

No villain. No resolution.
Just fractured input… and a body trying to breathe inside of it.

Synesthetically, this kind of hurt is shape-shifting.
It doesn’t stay one flavor.
It cycles.
Some days it tastes like chalk… others like burning plastic.
It has a shifting smell — sometimes static, sometimes sugar that’s turned.
And it hums in the lower spine.

You know something’s wrong.
But you can’t say who did it.
And worse… you can’t say it didn’t happen.
You feel it. You taste it.
You carry it.
And no one sees it.

That’s what this post had to say.
That not all damage is cinematic.
Not all trauma is loud.

Some of it is made of love and contradiction.
Some of it left no scar… just noise in your nervous system.
Some of it taught you to flinch at kindness… because the worst moments were surrounded by love.

There is no clear devil.
But there’s still rot.
Still damage.