The Work of Unwiring

There is something I cannot contain. It moves through the hours and finds no escape. The days repeat, ordinary enough, yet the weight deepens. Beauty does not console. It wounds. What I carry has no clear name. It might be desire. It might be grief. It might be nothing more than the fact of being alive.

I never imagined this would be the course my life would take. I was schooled in the idea of happy endings, prepared for permanence rather than loss. But seasons shift. What begins in light does not always remain there. What felt secure proves fragile. The world moves in patterns we cannot refuse. Migratory birds return to the same grounds year after year, guided by memory written into the body. My own return is different. I come back only to absence. The horizon narrows. Life closes in. The story moves forward whether I consent or not.

Once I believed in sequence. Cause followed effect. Love followed devotion. Endings followed beginnings. But the world does not honor that order. It recurs. It contradicts. It offers beauty in the same breath as undoing. To live inside it is to accept dissonance as the ground beneath your feet. Still I ask how to interrupt it. How to end what keeps circling back. How to step outside the repetition when repetition is all I know. Cicadas surface in intervals of thirteen or seventeen years, their rhythm fixed long before they break through. Immune to disruption. They do not choose emergence. They are compelled by something buried. Something set in motion long before awareness. I think of that compulsion. I think of how easily longing disguises itself as inevitability.

What if the same is true of me. What if the predetermined course is not chosen but scripted. I move toward the same inexorability, as if summoned. I mistake perpetuity for fate. I wonder if escape is possible, or if I am condemned to resurface in the same silence, again and again. I remember how I kept revolving, even when I knew the ending. Each time I believed it might be different. Each time I mistook compulsion for devotion. Each time I confused persistence with permanence. The same words. The same silences. The same leaving. I called it love. It was only the orbit of my own undoing. We are built to seek constancy, even when it harms us. The brain rewards recognition, mistaking familiarity for safety. Attachment rewires itself around what is repeated. Binding us to what we know instead of what we need. Desire does not distinguish between nourishment and deprivation. It only clings to the source.

I decided I would stop it. That I would alter the trajectory. Not through hope, but through discipline. I began to study why the mind clings to what destroys it. Why the body confuses habit with safety. I read Bowlby on attachment and the ways early bonds script our future ones. Judith Herman on trauma and survival, Bessel van der Kolk on the body carrying memory. Hebb on the stubbornness of neurons that wire themselves tighter with each iteration. I returned also to Augustine, unsettled until the heart finds peace, and Kierkegaard on despair as the malady unto death. Even Teresa of Ávila, who wrote of the soul’s chambers and the torment of its long night. Knowledge did not soften the burden, but it gave it contour. And once it had contour, I could begin to resist it. Resistance is not clean. It feels like tearing against instinct. The body demands what the mind has already named as harm. Nights stretch longest in this conflict. The hours filled with insistences I refuse to obey. To unlearn is to suffer, but to remain is worse.

I start with the smallest experiments. Walking into a room and staying long enough to feel the air settle. Holding a gaze a second longer than comfort allows. Reaching for a word I would have once swallowed. Each act feels precarious, as if it might collapse under its own weight. Still I push at the edges, searching for evidence that survival can widen into living. Some days the proof flickers. A laugh I don’t immediately distrust. A hand brushing past without recoil. The quiet recognition that not every silence is omen. Other days it vanishes, and I am left measuring absence again. Progress, if it exists, is uneven. Brittle. Easily undone. Even the smallest gestures feel dangerous, as though they carry within them the possibility of fracture. Yet I keep testing. Sitting at tables where I do not know the language. Letting myself be seen in light that once felt punishing. Counting these moments like traces, reminders that the body might relearn what it once feared. Each attempt provisional, but marking a distance from the life that ended. Each attempt a refusal to remain only in survival.

I try to forget the choreography of leaving. Hands learn distance, though they ache to close the gap. The reflex to reach is broken. Recast into something quieter. A compass that once pointed backward lies useless. Circuits flicker and rewire until longing feels almost elective. Edges hold firm, tempered but not dulled. Absence no longer dictates survival. Forgiveness stirs from within. Halting. Tentative. Small mercies arrive without demand. Ordinary endures, tenuous as breath. I am still trying. Trusting what is unsteady. Living without rehearsing departure, allowing silence to be silence and not warning. Touch is believed in, even when it trembles. Memory pulls, and still I stand. Longing rises unhidden. The urge to withdraw persists, yet I do not move. What is not mine I set down. Relief arrives and I do not question it. I stay present, though life keeps moving forward.

I give myself chances to touch the world again. A dinner on a rooftop where I first met him. The lights strung overhead swaying in the wind. Every laugh too sharp in my ears. Sitting across from strangers at a long table, the clink of glasses a language I try to relearn. I look at faces and wonder if I belong among them. I listen for laughter and feel the distance between sound and bone. I want to believe in healing, but the body hesitates. The pulse quickens, the chest tightens, as if it remembers too much. I keep pushing anyway. I keep moving toward what I fear I cannot hold.