My brain has always been strange with emotions it does not recognize. when I feel something new, it does not bloom in my chest like it does for others. it gathers in my head like a storm, like liquid vibration pressing against the walls of my skull. it does not hurt, but it unsettles me. it blurs my focus and pulls me away from whatever I am trying to hold onto. when I was with you, fear would occupy that space completely. I would wake up already tense, already overwhelmed, simply because you were there.

It was never your words that frightened me. it was your care. the good morning texts. the how are you doing today. the small gestures that meant you were staying. I was not afraid of conversation, not afraid of laughter or debate. I was afraid of consistency. I was afraid of someone who did not leave. if I were to write volumes about how terrifying that felt, I still would not capture the depth of it. the simplest human tenderness felt like standing at the edge of something infinite, and I did not trust myself not to fall.

I crossed lines and broke my own rules just to keep you close, and even that closeness carried its own kind of ache. holding you felt like both relief and danger at the same time. I wanted you desperately because you calmed the chaos in me, yet your presence triggered the very alarm system that chaos had built. you were teaching my nervous system a language it had never spoken before, and it responded with resistance instead of gratitude.

But something has been changing rapidly. I am lowering my armor piece by piece. when you ask me how I am doing now, I do not feel the same rush of panic. I accept the care, even if I am still learning how to feel it fully. fear occupied that part of my mind for years, and it left behind confusion. so I am patient with myself. I know the warmth is there. I know those small words are acts of love, and one day they will echo safety instead of alarm.

It is almost ironic that when you tell me you love me, I feel it everywhere. it moves through my bones, settles in my chest, soft and intense to being a little bit overwhelming at the same time. it is warmth without distortion. those three words were never tied to fear in my past, because you have never said them, so they arrive clean. but the gentle daily questions were once tangled with anxiety, my brain linked them to fear, so now I must untangle them slowly. I am repairing the map inside my head where care was once marked as danger.

There were times when my mind protected me by shutting you out entirely. days, weeks, even months where I would not think of you at all. it was not indifference. it was defense. In physiology language, my brain would whisper that losing you was too much to endure, so it would numb everything. that numbness for me it was felt like emptiness, but it was only a locked door. and every time I reached out to you again, it was because the door cracked open and I remembered what lived behind it.

I used to think I was disciplined beyond interruption. nothing could pull me away from what I chose to focus on. my mind was a controlled machine. but recently, today, while I was working on something important, you kept appearing in my thoughts. I would force myself back to the task, hold it for five minutes, and then there you were again. sometimes I missed you. sometimes I laughed at something you once said. sometimes I began to plan for the future in my head without permission.

It felt like chaos, but not the destructive kind. it was a beautiful disobedience. my mind, once rigid and guarded, was allowing itself to wander toward you. I am not used to losing control in this way, yet I do not want to regain it. this is a mess I want to keep. this is a disruption that feels like life instead of threat.

For years I was hollow without understanding why. I carried an emptiness that no achievement, no distraction, no discipline could fill. when I finally found the missing piece, fear seized it from my hands before I knew what it was. I lived with that absence without naming it. now I know it was you. and now, instead of running from the feeling, I am choosing to stay inside it.

Once, your presence was the specter that fractured my mind out of fear; now, your absence is the fog where I am forever unmade. my curse has simply traded I have traded the suffocation of closeness, for the drowning of your memory, I’m not longer a prisoner of fear, but a nomad of absence.

I missed you today darling.