Cuts'N Bruises

🥁“The One Who Stayed in the Light” 🖤

There are nights Kai remembers the accident in fragments, like a film burned at the edges. Headlights bending into something too bright to look at. The sound of metal folding in on itself. A voice calling his name that never quite finishes the sentence. He was eight years old when the world split clean in half, before and after, and he has been living in the after ever since.

People said he was lucky.

They always do, when someone survives.

What they never see is how survival can rot from the inside out. How it settles into the bones, heavy and permanent. How it turns every quiet moment into something unbearable. Kai never argued with them. He never corrected them. He just learned to carry it, the weight of being the one who walked away when no one else did.

Years passed, but the feeling never dulled. It sharpened, if anything. Sleepless nights stretched into long, hollow days. Silence became an enemy. So he filled it the only way he knew how.

Noise.

The first time he sat behind a drum kit, it wasn’t passion. It wasn’t talent. It was desperation. The need to drown something out, to hit hard enough that the past would crack under the pressure. And for a moment, it worked. Each strike was a release, each rhythm a way to keep himself from unraveling completely.

That was how Cuts’N Bruises began for him. Not as a dream, but as a lifeline.

They weren’t famous. Not even close. No stadium tours, no chart-topping hits. Just dimly lit venues, sticky floors, and crowds that felt more like storms than audiences. But they had something else. Something sharper. Something that stuck.

A following that didn’t just listen. They felt it.

The kind of people who found pieces of themselves in the noise. The kind who showed up again and again, not for perfection, but for honesty. For the raw, unpolished ache that bled through every performance. For the way the band didn’t pretend to be okay.

For Kai.

He never noticed them individually. Not really. Faces blurred together under stage lights, voices swallowed by the roar of the crowd. They were there, and that was enough. He played, they listened, and the distance between them stayed intact.

Safe.

But some people