Combustion

Things are fucking shifting, and I can taste it in the way familiar words now cut different paths through my body. The same explanations I've recited about my wounds—neat little packages I could hand to anyone who asked—now drag their fingernails across my chest, demanding I feel them instead of just say them. My face betrays me: muscles above and below my eyes twitching as tears show up uninvited, interested in what's finally happening here.

I saw this reel about a movie where they talked about oxygen rushing in when you crack a window for fresh air. The room becomes an incubator for your pain, they said. But when you let that air in—when you finally open the fucking window—you get closer to the end of your grief processing. The fresh air doesn't soothe. It's gasoline on fire. It makes everything combust. The grief hits full throttle, and that's how you know you're close to healing.

That's where I am now. I feel it in my bones—the way things aren't less scary because they've shrunk or lost importance, but because I keep coming back to them. Like visiting a house you're afraid of until the floorboards become familiar under your feet. The fear doesn't disappear; it just stops being the loudest thing in the room. Then there's space for the grief to breathe, space for me to feel what my brain was trying so desperately to organize into something manageable.

Words carry weight that could crush you if you're not careful. We drown ourselves in explanation, piling word on word on word, trying to build a bridge between our experience and someone else's understanding. But what happens when you stop being afraid of how they'll receive what you're saying? What happens when you stop contriving the perfect way to be perceived?

You fucking feel it. You hand them your raw, beating heart—no packaging, no bow. The contortions that crawl across your face when real feeling moves through you. The pulse hammering in your ear canal, your neck, your fingertips. Heat spreading from your chest like spilled wine on white fabric. Your throat forgetting how to work as it realigns with the truth of what actually happened to you—not the version you want someone else to file away neatly, but the messy, unorganizable reality that lives in your body.

Because feelings can't be organized. Truth can't be alphabetized. Intuition doesn't follow Robert's Rules of Order. It can only be felt, and the only way to trust it is to get into the practice of feeling it, over and over, until your body remembers what your mind spent years trying to manage and forget.

Revisit what you fear until you simply meet it there. Come to the fear like you're approaching a wounded animal—with curiosity, compassion, intent. Look at it. Explore its edges. Shift around in it like you're trying to find the right position in an uncomfortable chair. Eventually, when you've examined all its nooks and crannies, when you've sat with it long enough that it stops being a monster and becomes just another thing in the room, the fear loosens its grip.

And when things are less fear-based, you can finally sit with the actual feeling that needs to be felt. The one underneath all the noise. The one you've been running from.

That's where grace lives. In the space between the end of running and the beginning of feeling. In the combustion. In the fucking oxygen finally rushing in.