There you are again - that familiar tightness between my ribs, the weight that speaks of all the rooms within myself I've been afraid to enter. You're the doorkeeper of memories, the guardian of spaces I've marked as "too much" or "not yet." Each breath against you feels like pushing against a wall I built long ago, brick by brick, survival by survival.
I feel you most in the quiet moments, when the world stops its spinning long enough for me to notice all the unopened letters inside my own chest. You remind me of all the conversations I haven't had with myself, all the feelings I've carefully folded and tucked away like winter clothes in summer, all the parts of me still waiting to be acknowledged and held in the light.
You live in my shoulders now, atlas of tension mapping every place I've stored "I'm not ready" and "maybe later" and "what if it hurts too much?" Each morning, you gather there like unspoken words, like birds too heavy with truth to take flight. You're the space between who I am and who I could be if I dared to unlock every door inside myself.
Sometimes I think you're not really fear at all, but wisdom - wisdom wearing anxiety's clothes, teaching me that healing isn't a destination but a landscape, vast and varied as any continent. You're the growing pains of a soul learning to inhabit its full size, the ache of a heart discovering it can hold both darkness and light.
So perhaps I should thank you, this fear that feels like forgiveness waiting to happen, this anxiety that tastes like potential. You are the compass pointing toward every part of myself that needs to be seen, the map of a journey that begins with staying still enough to feel. You are the proof that my inner world is still wonderfully, terrifyingly uncharted - and that maybe, just maybe, that's exactly as it should be.
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