#errorstate

I think I hear them whenever my chest does.

They echo through my head like sound trapped beneath the dome of a blue-roofed Orthodox church from my childhood - hollow, cavernous, and about as empty as that husk of ice he calls a heart.

It's the kind of sound that does not feel external at all, but biological.

Like something inside the body dragging itself across tile.

His infidelity lives somewhere between my ribs now.

Not dramatically.

Not loudly.

It settled there quietly, like fluid in the lungs.

Most days I function around it.

I go to work.

I go to the gym.

I laugh too loudly.

I flirt.

I make coffee.

I answer messages.

I stand in front of mirrors and do my makeup with the precision of somebody trying not to look recently mauled.

And then, without warning, my body remembers.

I will be standing in line at a store and suddenly feel my stomach drop so violently it is nauseating.

My hands go cold.

My hearing dulls at the edges.

Everything around me begins to feel strangely far away, as if I am observing my own life through thick aquarium glass.

Dissociation feels embarrassingly unimpressive when you describe it honestly.

It is not cinematic.

It is not madness.

It is staring at a traffic light too long because your brain stopped processing color correctly.

It is forgetting where you were walking halfway there.

It is someone touching your arm gently and your nervous system reacting as if you have been caught on fire.

I think the worst part is how physical heartbreak actually is.

Nobody tells you that betrayal settles into the body like a chronic illness.

That your appetite changes.

Your sleep changes.

Your posture changes.

Even pleasure changes.

He did not simply hurt my feelings.

He altered the texture of my inner life.

There are moments now where I look at him and feel two realities trying to occupy the same space at once:

the boy I love more tenderly than I know how to describe,

and the person who taught my body that love can become unsafe without warning.

That contradiction exhausts me.

Sometimes he is speaking and I drift away halfway through the sentence, not because I do not care, but because part of me is still stuck at the exact moment I realized I had been made a fool of.

That version of me never fully came back.

She still lives there somewhere -

quietly staring at the wound,

pressing shaky fingers against it,

Sunset in spring

Wet asphalt

The smell is so nostalgic it seeps into my bones. I forget how much I miss it

And that haunting feeling of you breathing down my neck every time I close my eyes

You go for a walk to clear your head,

You end up running from something that's far past following you.