The old wound watches the peak of your career from the far rim of the sky, dead across the axis. Chiron, the limping centaur whose injury became its teaching and never a body with mass, faces the meridian, the visible heading your work climbs toward. The sore place and the public direction you chase keep colliding, each pole naming what the other refuses to see. Reach for the vocation you show everyone and the scar yanks from behind, demanding its say in the portrait the world is painting of you. Some days the work shines and the wound goes quiet. Other days it muscles into the frame uninvited. You hold the cord taut between them, dropping neither end.