The body remembers what the mind wishes it could forget. The real thing. The hollowed-out feeling in your sternum when you wake up, the one that arrives before the memory does. The sickening lurch in your gut when you see their car, or one that looks like it. It’s the phantom limb of a life you were building, and it throbs with a pain that is anything but metaphorical. You find yourself rereading old messages, a digital form of self-harm, searching for clues you missed, for the exact moment the poison entered the bloodstream. You check their social media, a ghost haunting the machine, watching a life that continues without you. Your thumb scrolls, your heart plummets. Again. And again. Food tastes like ash. Sleep is a visitor that rarely stays the night. This is not a problem of the mind. This is a five-alarm fire in the body. And what does the world offer for this? Platitudes. “Time heals all wounds.” “Just think positive.” “Let it go and you’ll attract someone better.” This is the vocabulary of spiritual bypassing, a language that has no tolerance for the messy, visceral reality of human suffering. It is a demand that you