Ink That Remembers

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Sometimes my words come back like weather—
unannounced,
heavy with the scent of storms I thought had passed.

I open a page
and the air changes.
My throat catches fire,
a quiet kindling—
as if each sentence struck a match
and forgot to put it out.

My chest folds in on itself,
a house closing its windows
against a wind it recognizes.

And my eyes—
traitors to time—
gather rain from a sky
that no longer exists.

There are pages I have buried.
Not erased—never erased—
just lowered gently
into the soft ground of forgetting.

But even there,
they breathe.

Roots of ink curl beneath memory,
drinking from the same dark place
they were written from.
Sometimes,
I feel them tug.

A line rises—
a ghost at the edge of language—
waving,
whispering,
you remember.

I turn away.

Other times, I don’t have the strength
to resist the pull.
I skim—
not reading,
but grazing the surface
like someone afraid
to see their own reflection in deep water.

Still, the words find me.

They slip between breaths,
settle in my lungs,
rewrite the rhythm of my body
until I am no longer reading—
only reliving.

It is a strange thing,
to be both the storm
and the place it ruins.

To hold the pen
and still feel like the page—
creased,
carried,
left open in the rain.

Maybe that is what pain does—
it teaches language to echo.
It teaches silence to remember.

So I write
in fragments of thunder,
in the quiet after breaking,
in the soft, stubborn pulse of survival.

And I leave these pieces behind
like constellations—
not to guide anyone else,
but to remind myself
that I once burned here.

Because writing from pain
is not a single wound.

It is a landscape.

And every time I return,
something in me
has to learn
how to walk through it again.