Crow and Flame

Healing isn’t linear.

A trigger tied to something from twenty years ago isn’t failure—it’s an echo in the nervous system.
The body remembering a life it once had to survive.

A shove.
An attack.
Words that cut deeper than they should have.

The body keeps score long after the mind tries to forget.

These echoes don’t disappear.
They wait.

They settle into bone and breath, quiet and patient, until something small—something almost meaningless—cracks the surface. And suddenly, it’s not today anymore. It’s then.

Alarms sound for ghosts I thought were long buried.
They rise uninvited.
They haunt without permission.

I try to stay regulated.
I try to be there for myself.

But sometimes it feels like reaching for steady ground that keeps shifting beneath me. Like trying to hold water in trembling hands.

Old habits slip back in like they’ve been waiting at the door.
My chest tightens.
My breath shortens.
My nerves spark like live wires.

And anxiety doesn’t ask—it takes.

In those moments, I am not who I’ve worked so hard to become.
I am who I had to be.

And the intrusive thoughts—
they grip my mind and my throat like a poltergeist,
loud, relentless, pressing in until I can’t tell what’s real and what’s remembered.

But here’s the truth I keep coming back to, even when my hands shake holding it:

An echo is not the present.

It’s a memory looking for acknowledgment.
A signal, not a sentence.

My body is not betraying me.
It is protecting me the only way it learned how.

And maybe healing isn’t about silencing the echoes.
Maybe it’s about learning not to answer every alarm.

To pause.
To breathe.
To remind the body:

We are not there anymore.

The crow watches.
The flame burns.

One remembers.
One transforms.

And I—
I am learning how to stand in between them.

Not cured.
Not finished.

But aware.
And still choosing to stay.