healing through words

We’ve come full circle,
I said to my husband,
casual,
like I hadn’t been rehearsing the line in my head for weeks;
like I wasn’t already clutching
the silence between my ribs
like a life raft.

We were standing in the kitchen,
morning light slanting across yesterday’s dishes,
and I said it,
full circle,
like healing was geometry,
like survival made a neat loop.

But my heart;
my heart was not having it.
It was freewheeling,
beating a punk rock rhythm in my chest,
screaming: Don’t go back there.
Don’t you dare pretend you’re the same person who walked in a year ago.

I remembered the room.
The breathless hush before the word.
Her eye twitching,
the soft collapse of her face
as she rearranged her features into bad news.
I remembered how everything
in me
shattered
quietly.

I thought:
Will she remember me?
Will she see me and remember
how she changed the map of my body
with one sentence?

She didn’t.

Her eyes skimmed past my name like it was just another Tuesday.
Like I wasn’t the girl who wept in her office
while trying not to.
Like I wasn’t the open wound she closed the door on.

And in that moment,
I knew.

We didn’t come full circle.

This isn’t a circle.
This is a labyrinth;
a jagged, spiralling, never-symmetrical return
to the self
I no longer am.

There is no perfect shape to this kind of survival.
No neat ending.
Only the ache that lingers
in rooms where names are forgotten
and lives are split into
before
and
after.