I Feel Myself Torrent !exclusive! -

I dried my face. I went to the kitchen. I made tea, and I let it steep too long, and I drank it bitter.

I screamed into a pillow until my throat bled. I wrote letters I’d never send, filled with words I’d never speak. I tore a photograph in half—not out of spite, but out of honesty. That person wasn't me anymore. That person had been standing still while the river rose around her knees, pretending she wasn't getting wet.

It started small: a forgotten grocery list that surfaced in my mind with the clarity of a scream. Then a laugh I’d buried six years ago, rising like a bubble from deep water—my mother’s laugh, the one she used before the treatments, before the slow quiet. I didn’t summon it. It just came. And then another. And another. Memories I’d locked in chests, weighted with stones, were now drifting up unannounced. i feel myself torrent

On the seventh day, the torrent slowed. Not stopped—never that. But slowed enough for me to see the shape of what had been underneath all along. Not a wreck. Not a ruin.

It was a fact. Like gravity. Like rain. Like the river that would keep running long after I was gone, and the one that would keep running inside me until I wasn't. I dried my face

The rain had stopped hours ago, but the air still clung to everything—clothes, hair, the insides of my lungs. I stood on the edge of the overpass, watching the river below churn brown and fast. Not watching, really. Feeling. Because somewhere beneath my ribs, something had begun to move. Not a flutter. A current.

I stopped going to work. Stopped answering texts. Sat on my apartment floor with the windows open, even though it was November, even though the neighbors stared. I let the cold in. I let the sound of traffic in. And I let it come. I screamed into a pillow until my throat bled

By Tuesday, I couldn’t sit still. My leg bounced under my desk. My pen skated across paper without my permission, drawing the face of a boy I’d loved and lost to silence, not death. By Thursday, I was crying in the shower without sadness. Laughing in the grocery store without joy. Everything was leaking. Everything was flowing.