It didn’t happen in one night.
It was a slow bleed.
A quiet erosion.
A week of walking around with my nerves exposed,
pretending I wasn’t coming apart at the seams.
Every day I felt myself thinning —
thoughts slipping like wet paper,
the world tilting at odd angles,
a faint tremor beneath everything I touched.
There’s a kind of exhaustion that lives under the skin.
Not visible.
Not nameable.
Just a constant ache behind the ribs,
a pressure you can’t exhale.
I lived inside that ache this week.
Still functioning,
but slightly detached —
as if I existed half a step behind myself,
watching my life through a crack in the glass.
The brink isn’t loud.
It whispers.
It wears your face.
It goes to work.
It laughs at the right moments.
It empties you grain by grain
until you’re more hollow than whole.
By last night, I was all sharp edges and thin glass.
One more wrong breath
and I would have shattered.
But I didn’t.
Not fully.
I screamed into a pillow until something inside me gave way.
I dragged myself back into my body with warm food.
I let my breath settle like dust after a storm.
And Joel sat beside me —
not fixing,
not probing,
not demanding anything from me.
Just steady.
Quiet.
Present.
He is my calm in the chaos,
the still point I cling to when everything inside me is shaking.
There is something about him —
his softness,
his patience,
his beautiful soul —
that grounds me without even trying.
There’s no redemption here.
No flare of triumph.
No mythic rebirth.
Just a woman left hollow after the tempest,
quietly gathering what’s left of herself.
And maybe that’s the closest thing to a storm witch I get to be today —
not the one who summons the lightning,
but the one who survives its passing,
standing barefoot in the wreckage,
heart echoing with the sound of a storm
that has finally spent itself.
I’m not triumphant.
I’m not healed.
I’m just… here.
Hollow, but here.
And sometimes that is the only magic I have left.