Safe and Cold and Alone

Excerpts from journals dated 2/18/25 and 3/2/25

I feel alone and hunted. I feel disheveled and ungrounded. I am no longer home; I am in a den that reeks of panicked sweat where I fail to nurse shot nerves on a bed of hard rock.

And in the distance, the sky churns with the hurricane of everything else that I stop my ears to: the news, the world, the future. I am tucked in a damp cave listening to the sounds of a passing storm, and the screams of the unhidden. 

Why can’t I relax? Why can’t I relax? Why can’t I relax? My shoulders won’t slump, my head aches, I can’t even cry.

Uncertainty hangs over me, as ever, and a kind of exhaustion that has become familiar in the last few weeks, to where I’m beginning to wonder if I’d always felt it. I am fortunate to remember that it wasn’t always like this, that I am feeling the fading ache of a distant and more severe pain.

I have been gone from home for so long that this bivouac and its uncomfortable branches are as familiar as my old life. When I consider leaping back to safety, declaring that I no longer want this freedom and this authentic life, it sounds like climbing out of a freezing a lake to jump back in at a different spot. At least here I can save my bare feet from the rocks at the shore, if I have faith that my heart will keep me warm and outperform this glacial pool I’ve ventured into.

The numbness of my fingers follows the nerves back into my memory, where I cannot even remember which sensations I should recall for them. I can’t remember the words I used for the things I used to love.

What was I when I began wading? What brought me to this place? The cold has strangled all the past from me, and while I am sure I shouldn’t miss the kinds of memories that led me here, I also have no means of being thankful that I am finally still. Surely this painful, biting loneliness and the caress of this primordial nothingness is a solace to that self I can’t remember, or why would he have brought me here and stepped me into this place?

Is it getting warmer the longer I tread water? Or have I lost the kind of feeling my old self knew? Will I feel again?

When all that is left is the abstraction of my body suspended between two infinities, the stars above and abyss below, I might still feel fear that someone overhead is watching me, or something below is gently reaching for my kicking feet.

I am comforted, at least, that I do not even feel that fear. There is nothing in the water. There is nothing in the sky. I am safe, and cold, and alone.