The Line Between Tired and Torn

She doesn’t move, but something in her watches — the river, the tree, the life she hasn’t touched yet.

How the quiet that erases you becomes the fire that brings you back.

There is a quiet that does not save you.
A quiet that does not soften.
A quiet that does not gather you
the way the protective hush once did.

This quiet is heavy.
It presses on your chest
until breathing feels like labor.
It settles in your throat
like sand and bitterness,
grainy, dry, impossible to swallow.

Every word you don’t speak
turns venomous on your tongue.
Every feeling you bury
ferments into something sharp.

This quiet doesn’t cocoon you.
It demands your submission.

It drains you slowly,
not because you’re tired,
but because something in you
keeps carrying what should have been set down.

You still see color,
but it doesn’t reach you.
It doesn’t touch the place
where you used to feel alive.

Hollow.
A version of yourself who whispers,
Why bother?

Your body begs for sleep,
but the quiet you’re in
doesn’t offer rest.
It offers the blinding kind,
the restless kind,
the kind filled with shadows
that drag you deeper instead of lifting you.

It hurts.
Everywhere.
Even breathing feels like a task
you weren’t built for.

So you make yourself small.
You fold inward
as if shrinking could ease the ache.
But it doesn’t.

This is not rest.
This is erasure.

There is a moment,
small, almost forgettable,
when the ache shifts.

Not the sharp kind.
Not the kind that screams.
The other kind.
The one that rises from beneath the ribs,
a low, steady throb
that refuses to be ignored.

It doesn’t bring clarity.
It brings discomfort,
a flicker,
a pulse,
a breath that lands wrong.

Something inside you
begins to resist.

The quiet you’ve been living in
no longer feels like shelter.
It presses in,
subtle but relentless,
as if the air itself
has started to turn against you.

And the ache keeps insisting,
not loudly,
but with a persistence
you can no longer dismiss.

It insists until you can’t pretend
this is rest anymore.

Because rest doesn’t hollow you out.
Rest doesn’t make you flinch
at your own reflection.
Rest doesn’t turn your voice
into a ghost inside your own mouth.

This ache,
this quiet ache,
is the first sign
that you are not tired.

You are torn.

There is a point
when the ache stops warning you
and begins to draw a boundary.

It doesn’t erupt.
It doesn’t demand.
It rises slowly,
like a coal remembering
it was once a flame.

A warmth gathers beneath your sternum,
small but undeniable.
A pulse you haven’t felt in far too long.
A heat that steadies
instead of scorches.

The quiet that once swallowed you
begins to crack.

You feel the shift in your bones.
You feel the air change around you.

And then the truth surfaces,
not gently,
but with the clarity of something
you can no longer ignore.

This heaviness is not yours.
This silence is not safety.
This shrinking is not survival.

And with that naming,
something ancient inside you
stirs.

A spark.
A refusal.
A remembering.

You feel your spine straighten.
You feel the fire return,
not as fury,
but as recognition.

You are not here to be erased.
You are not here to be dimmed.
You are not here to carry
what corrodes you.

The fire rises
because you do.

And somewhere in that shift,
you feel her.

Elowen.
Not intervening.
Not correcting.
Simply witnessing.

A presence at the edge of your breath,
steady as dusk,
quiet as a tide returning.

She does not tell you what to do.
She does not drag you forward.
She only reminds you,
in the language of bone and ember,
that you were never meant
to disappear.

You can choose differently.

Not all at once.
Not with certainty.
Not with the kind of strength
you think healing requires.

You choose in small ways first,
a breath held a little longer,
a truth you let stay in your mouth
instead of swallowing it.

You choose by letting something warm
reach the places that went cold.

And the quiet that once suffocated you
begins to loosen its grip,
not because it releases you,
but because you stop holding it.

You step toward the fire,
not the blaze,
not the fury,
but the steady heat
that has been waiting for you
beneath the ash.

You step toward yourself.

And in that small, trembling step,
you feel the truth settle:

You were never tired.
You were torn.
And now you are returning
to the fire that never left you.

@notesformysoulmate

This work is protected—not to gatekeep, but to honor the fire, the return, and the woman who refused to disappear.
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If this piece stirred something quiet in you, the next doorway waits here:

She Rose Anyway: A Self‑Reckoning

The rise that follows the quiet — the becoming that begins when you finally return to yourself.

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