I woke this morning to sunlight slipping quietly through the blinds, stretching across my bare arms like a gentle insistence—like the day itself was asking me to begin.

5:03 a.m.
Right on time.

It’s strange how my body has learned this rhythm—how it rises before I’m ready, before my heart has caught up. My eyes were swollen, heavy with dreams I didn’t want to remember. Seven unread texts waited for me, but I didn’t reach for them. Instead, there was only that familiar ache—a dull, steady pressure crashing against my ribs, reaching, always reaching, for my heart.

I blinked. Once. Twice.

I thought about getting up, about facing the morning like I’m supposed to… but instead, I turned over. I surrendered. I let the quiet pull me back under for two more hours of borrowed sleep.

When I finally got up, it wasn’t out of motivation—it was obligation. I wandered to the kitchen, opened the fridge, closed it. Opened it again. Closed it again. As if something inside would suddenly change, as if hunger would magically appear and I’d become someone who could cook breakfast and move through a normal routine.

I told myself stories—I’ll say I was reading Wild by Cheryl Strayed, that I just got lost in the pages… that’s why I stayed in my room so long. It almost sounded believable.

Less than an hour later, I forced myself into the shower. Changed outfits three times. Each one a quiet question: What is it within me that slips through open hands— like water no one can hold, like a song no one remembers?

And now here I am.

Back in bed.

A gray sweater, yoga pants. Cold feet searching for warmth beneath the covers. My body still, but my mind—unyielding. My heart heavy, like it’s been filled with something dense and unmovable.

Three hours passed in a blur of movement—errands, distractions, small attempts to outrun the waiting. I kept going back home, as if somehow I could will him into being there.

But he never came.

And… this is okay.

Because I’ve been here before.

I know the rhythm of these days—the quiet rise and fall of anxiety, the way it settles into the body and makes even the smallest task feel impossible. I know the exhaustion that comes from a mind that won’t slow down, and that voice—the one that whispers that a day like this must mean something worse.

But this is where I am different now.

I know how to separate a bad day from a bad life.
A moment from a collapse.
A feeling from a fact.

This is just a day.

Just a day where I am softer, more open, more susceptible to everything I try so hard to hold together. A day where I choose not to bury what I feel, not to let it rot in the hidden corners of my mind.

This is just a day.

Because my heart doesn’t ache without reason, and my mind doesn’t wander without cause. There is always a thread connecting what I’m feeling to what I’ve lived—and somewhere within that, there is understanding.

The path to peace… it’s not simple. It twists, it doubles back, it asks more of me than I ever expected. But it is not impossible.

Right now, I am grieving change.

The kind that happens quietly within you, reshaping you before you’re ready to be reshaped. The kind that takes something that never fully existed—but could have been everything—and leaves you wondering what might have been.

I feel the absence of a life I wanted so deeply. A life with him. One I’ll never have… because I’m too much or not enough.

Last night brought it all rushing back.

A wave of nostalgia. Of heartache I hadn’t felt in years. It caught me off guard, wrapped around my chest, and pulled me under. I left early. I went to bed with tears I couldn’t hold back.

I missed something that never even had the chance to begin.

And the future—uncertain, wide, unknowable—felt like a flame I couldn’t escape. Old feelings stood in front of me again, uninvited, asking me to break.

But I didn’t.

Because intensity is not weakness.
Anxiety is not failure.

These are moments—passing, temporary, human.

And I know now that avoiding them only deepens the pain, just as much as letting them define me.

So today, I choose something different.

I choose to feel it.

To sit in it. To let it move through me without shame, without resistance. To be raw and honest and present with whatever rises to the surface.

Because this—
this is how I grow.

Not by running. Not by hiding. But by allowing.

This is just a day.

A day that will pass.
A day that will soften.
A day that will teach me something, even if I don’t understand it yet.

This is just a day.

And I will be okay, I’ve learned to be in whatever comes my way.

JMS