The hum of the refrigerator is the only sound. Three weeks have passed since everything changed, yet nothing has changed at all. You keep busy to outrun it. You scroll, you binge-watch, you talk, you work, you do anything to keep the volume turned up, because you have a deep, gnawing suspicion that if the noise ever stopped, you would be swallowed whole by what you find in the silence. You tell yourself you’re “processing.” You’re “working on your stuff.” But are you? Or are you just rearranging the furniture in a burning house? You talk about your trauma, you analyze your patterns, you read all the books, but the raw, visceral charge of the pain is still lodged in your body. It lives in the tightness in your chest, the knot in your stomach, the ache in your jaw. It’s a feral animal trapped in the cage of your ribs, and all your intellectual understanding has done nothing to soothe it. You’ve tried to think your way to freedom. It hasn’t worked. It will never work. > *"Truly — the work is not to create love. You might end up just performing that — instead of really being it."*