Tether

I have spent my whole life trying to translate a language only I seem to hear.

It lives somewhere just beneath the surface, just under the sound of someone calling your name with the wrong kind of warmth, just after a conversation that ended a little too soon. It’s not a voice, not exactly. More like an ache. Like intuition’s quieter sibling. Something I feel before I can name.

Some feelings arrive like tidal waves in teacups, too vast to contain, too delicate to spill. So I set them down in metaphors, hoping they won’t drown the page.

When I was younger, I thought everyone felt it too but had agreed not to talk about it. Like some kind of secret pact adults made the moment they decided to stop asking big questions and start answering easy instead. But I never learned how to shut it off. It followed me through every version of myself. Louder in some seasons, softer in others, but always there. A frequency no one else seems to hear, but that I can’t ignore.

There are parts of me I’ve never said aloud. Not because I’m hiding, but because I haven’t yet found words that don’t betray the truth of that feeling. Language, for all its beauty, often feels like a blunt instrument when I need a scalpel.

It’s like holding a moon inside your throat. You try to speak, but what wants to come out is light, and longing.

Some truths roost in my chest like birds. Beating. Restless. Always just shy of flight. They stir when I’m quiet. They pace when I’m still. I don’t know if they want to leave or if they just need more space.

I try to write myself down and end up painting shadows with light. The outlines are there, sure, but the heat is missing. I rearrange words like furniture, hoping the right layout will finally feel like home. I touch truth, almost, but it slips away the second I try to pin it to the page.

I open my mouth to speak and out comes smoke. Something burned. Something real. Something I haven’t quite made sense of yet. People nod, they smile, they say that's beautiful, and I want to ask, Did you feel it? Did it hit you like it hits me, from the inside out?

My soul speaks in firelight and fragments, campfire embers rising toward heaven, hoping someone else can read the scripture within the ash.

Some days I think if I could just say the thing, just once, I’d finally be free.

I don’t mean escape. I don’t mean forgetting. I mean the kind of freedom that comes from being fully seen. The kind that lets you breathe all the way in, not just enough to survive. I imagine what it would feel like to speak and have the truth land. Clean, whole, unedited. For someone else to say, Yes. That’s my language, too.

Truth, I’ve learned, rarely arrives in a single sentence. It comes in fragments. In almosts. In the unsaid behind a quiet, I'm fine. It lives in the pauses, the metaphors we fumble through, the glances that last too long, the music we replay when no one’s watching. It lives in the trying.

I fear that’s the closest we ever get.

The act of trying, of reaching, isn't failure. It’s humanity. We are not made to be perfectly understood. We are made to collide gently, to echo one another in unexpected ways, to hold hands in the dark and say, I don’t have the words either, but I’m here.

I tried. I had to find the exact phrase, the perfect translation of that internal language. Freedom might be something else entirely. Maybe it’s not about saying the thing. It’s about staying soft. About trying. About listening. About being real, even when the words don’t work.

That thing is already here, beating, breathing, aching its way through me. It doesn’t need to be solved or translated. Maybe it just needs to be felt.

Because what if this longing, this quiet ache, this relentless search isn’t a flaw, but a guide?

What if it’s guiding me toward something real, something unspoken but profoundly alive? What if being understood isn’t the goal, but staying open is?

That’s the point. To feel it, deep, sharp, unfiltered. To let the ache move through you without trying to make it pretty. To stay open when it would be easier to shut down. To be unfinished. Exposed. Still reaching.

That’s what it means to be human. Not to have the right words, but to keep showing up anyway.