It happens in a moment so small
I almost miss it.
A shift in my chest,
a tightening beneath my ribs,
and suddenly everything I buried
is rising again.
Even when I pretend I don’t feel it,
I know it has been living there.
Settled deep in the quiet places
and pressed into the softest parts of me
because that is the only way
I know how to carry it.
I push it down
to keep moving,
to keep surviving,
to keep from falling apart.
But buried things have their own timelines.
Their own momentum.
Their own insistence.
And then the wave hits.
Not gently.
Not like something meant to be understood,
but with the full force
of every emotion I tried to outrun.
A surge of longing
for the version of life
I once believed could still happen.
Of regret.
For the choices made out of fear,
out of survival,
out of not knowing any better
than to keep quiet and keep going.
Of grief.
For all the what ifs,
and the paths that might have opened
if life had tilted
just a little differently.
It’s a grief heavy enough
to feel like its own weather system.
Persistent, unseasonal,
and impossible to ignore.
And as the wave breaks over me,
I find myself returning
to the same impossible questions.
Where did it all begin to fracture?
What was the exact moment
the line between before and after
quietly drew itself?
Was it loud and obvious
like a slammed door,
or subtle
like something slipping out of my hands
before I even realized I had been holding it?
What was the turning point?
The single hinge
upon which the rest of our lives pivoted?
I replay memory after memory,
not because I enjoy the ache
but because some part of me believes
that if I can just find
that one defining moment,
maybe I can make sense
of everything that followed.
I wonder,
Would we all be different people now
if one thing,
just one,
had gone another way?
If just one unbearable moment
had been softened?
Could one small shift
have saved us all
from the slow, quiet unraveling
we didn’t notice
until it was too late?
And yet
beneath all the questions,
beneath all the longing and regret
and grief for what might have been,
there is a big truth I hesitate to name.
That maybe the breaking
was always going to happen.
Maybe the foundation
was already cracked,
long before any of us
were able to see it.
Maybe the “before”
was not as whole
as memory makes it.
Maybe we were already
carrying too much silence,
too much hurt,
too many unspoken things
for anything else to have been possible.
But even knowing that,
the ache still rises.
The wave still comes.
Because the heart doesn’t measure truth
the same way the mind does.
It doesn’t care about logic
or hindsight
or inevitability.
It remembers possibility.
It remembers hope.
It remembers the people we tried to be
and the lives we almost lived.
It remembers the warm light
in the rooms where we once felt safe,
even if the safety was temporary
or imagined
or shattered by what came after.
And so the ache pulls me under again,
not to drown me,
but to remind me
there are parts of the past
I still carry tenderly.
Even the painful parts,
especially the painful parts.
Then slowly,
as the tide shifts,
the wave begins to recede.
Not because it’s resolved.
Not because I’ve answered anything.
Not because the grief has finished speaking.
But because emotions, like tides,
follow their own rhythm,
rising, crashing, withdrawing,
only to return again
when the pull becomes too strong.
And I’m learning, slowly,
to stand through the rising,
to breathe through the breaking,
to let the questions come
without demanding they save me.
There may never be a single moment
that explains it all.
There may never be a version of the past
that feels less painful,
less complicated,
less full of unanswered “what ifs.”
But somewhere within the wreckage
of everything that fell apart,
I am beginning to understand this:
The ache does not make me weak.
The questions do not make me lost.
The breaking did not mean the end.
It simply means
I am human
and still learning
how to carry both
the life I lived
and the life I imagined
without collapsing under the weight
of either one.
Shannbud 