I was seven. Maybe eight. I said it to my father, in the language we used for the things that actually mattered, and I remember being proud of it. It sounded like something a strong person would say.
Before that, leaving India used to wreck me. Every single time. The airport, the gate, my grandmother doing the smile people do so you don't see the other thing happening on their face. I would cry the whole way to security and then some of the way across the Atlantic, and I was not quiet about it.
Then my parents separated, and I stayed in India for about six months while the adults worked out what the rest of our life was going to look like. Nobody explained very much. I don't hold that against them. I've since learned that people in the middle of something rarely have a spare hand free to narrate it.
Somewhere in those six months, I stopped crying.
Memory
I stopped crying. It wasn't a decision I remember making.
Feeling
I felt strong. Genuinely — not brave-face strong. Strong like something had been installed.
What I thought it meant
So I decided that was what strength was. Not feeling it. Not being reachable.
What I learned later
Those are three different sentences, and it took me about fifteen years to notice that I had been treating them as one.
a child needs a rule
An adult gets to say this is complicated and it will hurt for a while and then it will hurt differently. A child can't hold that. A child needs a rule, and the rule has to be short enough to remember while something is happening to you.
Mine was:
stone is strong.
stone does not cry.
if nothing gets in,
nothing can hurt you.
It's not a bad rule. That's the part people miss when they hear it. It is a genuinely excellent rule, for a while, if what you need is to get through the next six months of a thing nobody is explaining to you.
strike the stone — 0 of 3
it worked
That's why it lasted. Nothing survives fifteen years inside a person unless it is doing something useful.
I barely cried after that. Not at goodbyes, not at funerals, not at the things where everyone around me had clearly been issued equipment I hadn't. I was reliable. I was calm in rooms that were not calm. People told me I was mature, and I collected it like a grade.
I got good at being the one who was fine.
It would be a long time before anyone pointed out the other half of the sentence — that a thing which cannot be entered also cannot be filled, and a thing that cannot crack cannot be gotten out of.
Mera dil patthar ho gaya. my heart became stone.
Everything after this is what happened to that stone.
Everyone in this story except me is unnamed — her, a friend, my father, someone. It is my story to tell and theirs to keep. Names are not hidden in the page source either; they were never written down.