I Feel Myself Torrent Now

It was a fact. Like gravity. Like rain. Like the river that would keep running long after I was gone, and the one that would keep running inside me until I wasn't.

My friend Lena called it a breakdown. My doctor called it "emotional dysregulation" and wrote a prescription for something that came in a teal bottle. But I knew better. This wasn’t breaking. This was melting. The dam I’d spent twenty years building—brick by polite brick, mortar made of "I'm fine" and "don't worry about it"—had cracked along a fault line I hadn't known existed. i feel myself torrent

I stood in front of the bathroom mirror. My hair was a nest. My eyes were red. But for the first time in years, I recognized the person looking back. Not because she was calm. Because she was moving. It was a fact

Outside, the clouds were gathering again. Good, I thought. Let it come. Like the river that would keep running long

The words came out wrong. They always did. But for the first time, they felt true.

The rain had stopped hours ago, but the air still clung to everything—clothes, hair, the insides of my lungs. I stood on the edge of the overpass, watching the river below churn brown and fast. Not watching, really. Feeling. Because somewhere beneath my ribs, something had begun to move. Not a flutter. A current.

On the seventh day, the torrent slowed. Not stopped—never that. But slowed enough for me to see the shape of what had been underneath all along. Not a wreck. Not a ruin.