The doorway you meet the world through stands at one end; the old injury watches from the far end, dead across the room. Chiron, the limping centaur whose hurt became its lesson and never a body with mass, faces your rising horizon along that axis, and neither pole reads alone. The face you put forward keeps colliding with the wound that doubts you belong here. Some days you greet a stranger with a brightness pulled tight over the cut. Other days the sore place locks the whole approach stiff. The mirror keeps both ends lit at once. You arrive honestly only while mask and wound stay staring across the gap, neither one shouting the other down.