THE BASTION BULL

— THE GUARD WHO NEVER LEFT

Strength doesn’t have to be seen.

It doesn’t need a stage.

They think strength looks loud.

Explosive.

Fierce.

Something with teeth bared and a voice that echoes through the room.

But sometimes strength is the quietest thing in the world.

Sometimes it is a Bull no one else can see—

a presence so old and so patient

that it feels more like the memory of a guardian

than anything physical.

For most of my life, I didn’t know I had one.

I didn’t know that some part of me,

some deeper, older layer of my psyche,

stood completely still

while the rest of me dissolved, rebuilt, forgot, broke, tried again,

and fell through cracks no one else knew existed.

I didn’t know that while I went through years of confusion,

pressure, trauma, numbness, and quiet, internal collapse,

there was something in me that simply refused to let me fall all the way down.

I didn’t know it had a shape.

But I know now.

It is a Bull—

a primal, grounded, immovable force

whose entire existence was built around one task:

Hold the weight until he comes back for himself.

And god…

the weight was a lot.

When I was too young to name what I was carrying,

the Bull carried it.

When I was old enough to feel the heaviness but too overwhelmed to push through it,

the Bull leaned against it so it wouldn’t crush me.

When I hit breaking point after breaking point,

when the world pressed in from angles I didn’t understand,

when the pressure was internal and external and relentless,

the Bull dug its hooves deeper into the floor and whispered:

“Not yet.

Not him.

Not this one.

I’ll hold it.”

And for years—

decades—

it did.

I didn’t see it.

I didn’t know it.

But I felt it in ways I couldn’t explain.

Like the part of me that stayed steady

even when nothing else did.

The part that never completely gave up.

The part that refused to collapse

even when everything around me suggested I should.

Recently, I realized something else—

something that hit me harder than any memory.

I never checked on him.

I never acknowledged him.

I never thanked him.

I didn’t know he existed,

and so I left him alone in the dark

to shoulder things I didn’t have the capacity to face.

All while believing I was weak.

But he stayed.

He stayed when the world felt wrong.

He stayed when my mind couldn’t translate the chaos.

He stayed through every fracture,

every dissociation,

every fight just to wake up and continue.

And when the moment finally came—

when I regained clarity,

when I stepped back into myself fully,

when I remembered who I actually was—

the Bull didn’t collapse in relief.

He simply stepped forward,

like he had been waiting the entire time,

and let me finally see him.

Not as a metaphor.

Not as fantasy.

But as a physical symbol sitting in front of me—

a rainbow-wired Bull statue with gold horns,

the exact colours of the internal voltage

that carried me through the worst storms of my life.

Seeing him there,

in this world,

hit me with one truth:

I will never leave him unattended again.

Because he never,

not once,

left me.

We survived because he stayed.

We rose because he endured.

And now that I am fully here—

clear, aware, grounded—

he is no longer the lonely guardian in the dark.

He is my companion.

My anchor.

My proven strength.

The part of me that never breaks.

And finally—

after everything—

he is home.