phantom pain.

that’s what it felt like,

this strange ache for a version of me that doesn’t exist anymore. isn’t it wild how the brain plays these quiet tricks? how it can make you feel something you thought you’d outgrown, like an emotional ghost brushing past your shoulder.
i was trying to explain it to my psychiatrist, this heaviness that kept slipping through the cracks of language. not quite sadness, not quite numbness. just this… sinking. the kind where you don’t want to move, not because you’re tired but because you’re afraid of what getting up might make you feel.

she asked questions in that soft-interrogation way therapists do, peeling back memory after memory until we reached that chapter. the one i don’t revisit often. the one where i kept trying to fill an emptiness with bodies. where i would crawl into moments i didn’t even want, only to leave them feeling icky, haunted, and carrying more scars than satisfaction.

it’s strange how the body remembers what the mind tries to forget.

she called it transference, the way our brains drag old emotions into new spaces without asking permission. how touching something from an earlier version of yourself can instantly pull you back into that era, even if your life looks nothing like it did then. it’s like hearing the song you used to cry to at seventeen and suddenly feeling your chest tighten, even though you’re smiling now.

a phantom limb.

a ghost emotion.

a reminder that healing isn’t linear, it loops, echoes, returns, not to punish, but to show you how far you’ve walked from where you started.