Mapping the Ache

There’s no easy path through love bound to duty, only a heart, dusted in ash, from the fire it had to survive.

I carry this feeling - quiet as my breath, old as my bones. It hums beneath my ribs like an ancient melody woven into my being. It speaks a language I have never learned, but still it calls—like the moon pulling the tide. I return, again and again, to the places that forged me. My feet trace paths like prayers I no longer believe, yet still recite. This path—love bound to duty—feels like penance seeking absolution. The line between blood and soul, blurred. This feeling is not love as the world defines it, it is heavier, buried in marrow. Sometimes I can navigate it. Most times I just try not to sink. A feeling with no mouth, no exit—just ache.

It feels like we do not speak the same language. Not just in words, but in how pain is seen—how it’s allowed to be. My pain appears like a riddle that’s too costly to solve—or worse, a weapon mistaken for ego. The message, the deflection, always the same: You are old enough, figure it out on your own. As if my pain is an unsolvable puzzle I brought on myself.

Push too hard, and the ground shifts. Blame drifts like smoke—toward shadows, toward circumstance, toward anything that is not reflection. Good intentions are the banner waved, the final word in a conversation that never truly begins.

And maybe there is good faith. Maybe there is love, or something shaped like it. But good faith does not make a wound less deep. It only makes it harder to name the blade.

But there’s no space for pain if pain can’t be held—can’t be honored. Vulnerability — a scarce language spoken at the place of the past. So I sit, mouth full of truths, with no hands to carry them. No heart open enough to feel them. Connection feels longed for—but only the kind that asks nothing of change. Avoidance: pure, practiced, passed down like treasure. The armor so heavy it no longer remembers the shape of a heart. There’s no seat for vulnerability—only room for connection choked by rules and shame. I am the only one who sat across from a stranger and unpacked my ghosts. The only one who named the patterns, tried to break the spells, face the questions that had no answers.

Healing in solitude rewrites the way presence feels. What once was habit becomes choice, and choices begin to falter under the weight of return. Thus, with every year, my returns grow fewer, like the slow fade of a photograph left in the sun. And in that fading confusion blooms. My absence mistaken for betrayal. Questions come but I do not find the courage for radical honesty, because radical receptivity is absent. Instead I offer fragments of truth, careful, trembling, like holding broken glass.

And yet, still, something calls. Quieter now—like the echo of a bell rung in a far-off valley. But it’s there. It’s always been there. Something is there, always has been.

And, even if it hurts, the hurt is mine.

Some wounds don’t close—they call.