I screamed into a pillow until my throat bled. I wrote letters I’d never send, filled with words I’d never speak. I tore a photograph in half—not out of spite, but out of honesty. That person wasn't me anymore. That person had been standing still while the river rose around her knees, pretending she wasn't getting wet.
I dried my face. I went to the kitchen. I made tea, and I let it steep too long, and I drank it bitter.
By Tuesday, I couldn’t sit still. My leg bounced under my desk. My pen skated across paper without my permission, drawing the face of a boy I’d loved and lost to silence, not death. By Thursday, I was crying in the shower without sadness. Laughing in the grocery store without joy. Everything was leaking. Everything was flowing. i feel myself torrent
Not all at once. Not the merciful flood that sweeps you away clean. No, this was worse and better: a steady, stubborn torrent. Every suppressed shout, every bite of swallowed anger, every night I’d pressed my fists into my thighs to keep from screaming—they were all waking up. They wanted out. They wanted air.
It started small: a forgotten grocery list that surfaced in my mind with the clarity of a scream. Then a laugh I’d buried six years ago, rising like a bubble from deep water—my mother’s laugh, the one she used before the treatments, before the slow quiet. I didn’t summon it. It just came. And then another. And another. Memories I’d locked in chests, weighted with stones, were now drifting up unannounced. I screamed into a pillow until my throat bled
I stood in front of the bathroom mirror. My hair was a nest. My eyes were red. But for the first time in years, I recognized the person looking back. Not because she was calm. Because she was moving.
And now the water was coming.
The words came out wrong. They always did. But for the first time, they felt true.
