Gone

Issue 52 • Fall 2025 • Nonfiction

The professor wrote ten words on the board, one by one, as though revealing them rather than spelling them:

Literally. Proof. Grace. Authentic. Cure. Silence. Virtue. Curate. Mercy. Snowflake.

She capped the marker and stood back, the faint squeak still lingering.

“Your assignment,” she said, “is to decide how these words fit together — and how you might assemble them into something worth remembering.”

Half the class already knew the route: sincerity, uplift, a paragraph about kindness.

The rest opened laptops and began typing the prompts into a search bar.

She shook her head. “Don’t tell me what these words mean. Tell me what they make you feel.

I began that night. Not a story, but a set of small repairs. Ten words, ten fragments. A way to see if any of them could still speak.

Here’s what came…

GOING

I. Words We’ve Broken

Proof /pruːf/

noun. Evidence sufficient to establish truth.

From Latin probare, to test, to try, to examine.

Waterproof. Bulletproof. Burden of proof. The word promises impermeability—proof against doubt, proof against damage. But watch what happens: we say “the proof is in the pudding” when the original phrase was “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.” Proof was never about certainty. It was about testing, tasting, the act of verification itself. We’ve mistaken the shield for the thing it protects. Now proof means: irrefutable. It used to mean: try this and see.

Proof begins with doubt — with striking gold to see if it’s false, with tasting the wine to see if it’s turned. Even love asks for proof, as though survival were the same as certainty. But testing doesn’t always confirm; it corrodes. The thing you examine too long eventually breaks under the scrutiny. Proof isn’t about what remains—it’s about what endures the trial long enough to speak once more.

But nothing is bulletproof if you use enough bullets. Demand too much of things.

Cure /kjʊə(r)/

noun. A means of healing or restoration to health.

From Latin cura: care, concern, attention.

We used to think cure meant kindness — a steady hand, a vigil kept beside someone’s bed. Now it means removal: the clean subtraction of what makes us difficult to love. We forget that cura was never about erasure but about attending — to sit with what ails, not silence it. Every cure carries its own shadow, a small violence disguised as mercy. The best ones leave something imperfect behind, still breathing, still strange. I trust those most. They remember what it costs to be made well.

The body remembers what was cut away. The mind can tell you where it was.

Authentic /ɔːˈθɛntɪk/

adj. Of undisputed origin; genuine.

From Greek authentikos — acting on one’s own authority. (cf. Heidegger’s Eigentlichkeit: owning one’s being, against das Man, “the They.”)

We keep demanding authenticity while living through filters. The word once meant self-originating—action from within without permission. Heidegger warned how the They scripts our speech, our tastes, our timing; we “fall” into averageness and call it real. What passes for authentic now is a credible performance: sincerity with captions. The older sense is lonelier. It belongs to the unobserved impulse before translation, before proof. It isn’t raw so much as owned—a quiet choosing no audience can verify. When I say authentic, I mean the moment you act without checking whether anyone would approve, and accept the risk that no one will.

The self that acts unseen is the only one still real.

Curate /kyoor-ayt /

verb: to select, organize, and care for items in a collection, exhibition, or presentation, traditionally requiring expertise, scholarship, and sustained attention to context and meaning.

From the Latin cūrāre — to care for, attend to, take charge of from cūra — care, concern, solicitude. Later Middle English: curate was the noun for a clergyman entrusted with the care of souls (cura animarum).

We’ve seen this root before. It used to mean something. A curator spent years learning how objects spoke to each other across time. We’ve literally gone from “the care of souls” to the “selection of fruit jams”. Now everyone with a Pinterest board curates their aesthetic. The barista curates the playlist. We’ve turned curation into selection, stripped it of scholarship, reduced it to taste. What we lost: the idea that arranging things could be a form of knowledge. That care required more than choosing. That some eyes see connections others can’t, and that seeing—real seeing—takes years to learn.

Now it just means: I picked this.

Look at me.

Virtue /ˈvɜː.tʃuː/

noun. Moral excellence; conformity to a standard of right.

From Latin virtus — strength, valor, worth (vir: man).

Virtue began as vigor. To be virtuous was to act with force in the service of the good. Somewhere we softened it — turned it into a performance of restraint, a refusal rather than a courage. Now it lives mostly online, measured in visibility: how pure the posture, how instant the outrage. The old meaning required risk. It demanded doing what was right when silence cost less. True virtue isn’t decorum; it’s endurance under threat, the quiet persistence of decency after the applause has gone.

Most goodness never trends. It survives without proof.

You recognize it only when the room is empty and the person stays.

II. Words I Miss. A lot.

Silence /ˈsaɪ.ləns/

noun. The absence of sound; quiet.

From Latin silentium — being still.

I don’t mean muteness or defeat. I miss the kind you step into and it steps back around you—room-shaped, humane. We used to leave edges unfilled: a pause before answering, the breath after a joke, the span in which a grief could arrange its furniture. Now the air is crowded with explanation. Silence was where attention lived. It let a face come into focus without commentary, let a thought finish building itself before it had to perform. In marriages and meetings, it did the hardest work—keeping what mattered from being bruised by speed. The old silence didn’t hide. It held. When I find a scrap of it now, I try not to speak first.

I wait.

It holds.

Snowflake /ˈsnəʊ.fleɪk/

noun. A feathery ice crystal that falls from a cloud.

From Old English snāwflocc — snow flake, a single, unrepeatable pattern.

Once, a snowflake was a small astonishment: a hexagon spun by temperature and chance. Chuck Palahniuk used it to wound us gently — you are not special, he meant, yet even that line admitted the beauty of believing you were. Then the word hardened. It became an insult for fragility, a way to sneer at anyone whose feeling outlasted the joke. We broke the metaphor twice — first by irony, then by cruelty. I still like to think the old meaning survives somewhere: a pattern that appears, briefly, impossible again. Melts. Leaves only proof it landed.

Most insults begin as something delicate.

Grace /ɡreɪs/

noun: Elegance or favor freely given.

From Latin gratia — goodwill, gratitude, blessing.

Grace was never about perfection. It was what arrived when perfection failed: a softness where judgment should have stood. We once called it divine because it came unearned—light finding the thing it forgave. It asked nothing except that we stop insisting on balance sheets of wrong and right. Now we use it to mean poise, a practiced smoothness that costs more than forgiveness ever did. I miss the old grace, the one that stumbled, caught itself, and kept offering its hand.

It doesn’t stay long when you name it.

It stays just long enough to be remembered.

Literally /ˈlɪtərəli/

Adverb. In a literal sense; exactly.

From Latin littera, letter.

The word that meant “actually, not figuratively” now means its opposite. “I literally died laughing.” You didn’t. That’s the point. That was the whole point. We had one word—one—that said: I mean the actual thing, not the metaphor.

It once drew a clean line: this happened, not a figure of speech. We turned it into an amplifier. “I literally died,” meaning I did not. The joke stuck. We lost the switch that signals precision. Now when you need the actual, you have to build scaffolding—honestly, truly, no exaggeration—just to say: this is exact. Dictionaries forgive the drift; usefulness does not. I keep one sentence for emergencies: I mean this literally. The ambulance hadn’t left. The sheet was folded back. When I touched my mother’s wrist, the skin was still warm.

“I mean this literally: the skin was still warm.”

Mercy /ˈmɜːsi/

noun. Compassion shown toward someone in one’s power.

From Latin merces — wages, reward; later, clemency.

Mercy used to be counted like coin: a remission, a debt forgiven. Its root carries payment, which is why real mercy always feels costly. It isn’t softness. It’s a chosen limit—someone deciding not to use all the power they have. We sentimentalized it into kindness, but mercy is sterner: the stayed hand, the sentence reduced, the breath you let a stranger keep. You cannot demand it; you can only receive it and be altered by the receiving. Most mercy is invisible. You know it by what does not happen. You remember it because you are still here.

Most mercy is invisible. You know it by what does not happen.

And by who doesn’t tell you why.

The professor said the exercise was simple.

Ten words.

“Write what they make you feel,” she said. Don’t perform. Just let them bloom into something human.”

At the time, I had no story.  I was wrapped around the axle of my own loss.

That night I tried to write something to describe that loss.

Ten definitions. But truer ones. Each word as it began, before we broke it or sold it out.

I wanted her to see what language could still hold if we handled it gently.

I wanted to be true to the words, not the assignment.

What’s been taken from them. What they used to hold before we made them cheap.

I struggled for a long time with the last lines.

Language should keep a record of our carelessness.

The cursor blinked. I typed and backspaced. Typed again:

We should be more careful.

The next year, I was still thinking about those ten words. About what they used to hold before we wore them thin. The professor had asked for something worth remembering, and I hadn’t known what that meant.

Then my father got sick.

Through that winter, while he was dying, I began to understand. She hadn’t been asking for definitions, or essays about meaning. She wanted proof that words could still hold something alive—that they could bear the weight of what we lose and still remain themselves.

After the funeral, I wrote it.

Not an assignment this time.

A record.

Ten words, used as they were meant.

I made no claims they couldn’t keep.

GONE

The winter my father was dying, I asked his oncologist for proof the medicine helped. I listened for the ring in his voice the way you strike metal to hear if it’s true. Some days it held. Some days it didn’t. Mostly it rang hollow—he hardly seemed to check.

There was no cure as erasure. Only care—cool cloths, counted breaths, the decision to stay because leaving would be easier.

What came that didn’t come from me or from science I called grace—unearned—a softening at the edge of pain, a light that forgave more than it fixed.  It was what remained when all else failed.

I tried to be authentic in the old sense: to act from my own small authority, not the chorus of advice. I sat. I kept his hand. I spoke only when speaking was mine to do.

At the bedside I curated a small museum of his last days: the watch, the book with its threadbare ribbon, his readers that looked like old money, his ink pen always within reach. Not taste, but context—so the objects spoke to one another and kept him company. Everything to its purpose, or its need.

I kept virtue quiet, but honest. The decent work of lifting, rinsing, returning, with no witness but the hour.  I worked at it, hoping I could blunt any shred of his pain.

We held silence like a room. It didn’t hide; it kept what mattered from bruising. Grief made its plans.  We waited in the quiet to learn them.

When he slept, I practiced mercy on the living—the nurse who was late, the brother who couldn’t come, the mother who left me an impossible task. I set down the right I thought I had and let them keep their breath.

When his breath finally stalled, I searched for a pulse—some threading back to a life.

I mean this literally: when I touched his wrist, the skin was still warm, as if the news had not reached that far.

The day after he left us, it snowed, a single snowflake landed on the black sleeve of his coat as we carried it to the car—a hexagon so exact it seemed proof of something. It melted. That was part of the design.  And, as Palahniuk warned, it left a mark—

unlike any other.

I folded the page in half. In the morning, I slid it under her door.

Issue 52 • Fall 2025

Fiction

Poetry

Fiction

Poetry