I Feel Myself Torrent [updated] -

The rain had stopped hours ago, but the air still clung to everything—clothes, hair, the insides of my lungs. I stood on the edge of the overpass, watching the river below churn brown and fast. Not watching, really. Feeling. Because somewhere beneath my ribs, something had begun to move. Not a flutter. A current.

The hardest part wasn't the sadness. It was the rage. A hot, stupid, beautiful rage at every person who’d told me to calm down. At every teacher who’d said "too sensitive." At every version of myself who’d smiled and nodded and drowned a little more. i feel myself torrent

A landscape. Carved new.

On the seventh day, the torrent slowed. Not stopped—never that. But slowed enough for me to see the shape of what had been underneath all along. Not a wreck. Not a ruin. The rain had stopped hours ago, but the

My friend Lena called it a breakdown. My doctor called it "emotional dysregulation" and wrote a prescription for something that came in a teal bottle. But I knew better. This wasn’t breaking. This was melting. The dam I’d spent twenty years building—brick by polite brick, mortar made of "I'm fine" and "don't worry about it"—had cracked along a fault line I hadn't known existed. Feeling

The words came out wrong. They always did. But for the first time, they felt true.

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.