I can feel the beginning of a compression cycle. I know the machinery of it by now, the way the pressure starts to gather behind the sternum, the way the days get a little heavier to lift. I am not guessing about it. I have ridden this enough times to feel it coming the way an old break aches before the weather turns. Something is tightening. The wave that carried me up here for a while is starting to slide back down the sand.
And here is the part I did not expect. The peace stayed. Usually when I feel this exact thing start to move I know what comes next, and it is not good. This time I went looking for the old dread and it was not where I left it. What I found instead was a quiet I have not had before, real peace, real self-acceptance, and I keep waiting to catch myself faking it and I do not catch anything. It is still there even now, even with the water pulling back. I keep checking on it the way you check a pilot light, half expecting it to be out, and it keeps being lit.
So there are two waves, and they are moving in opposite directions inside the same chest. One of them is rising. People are starting to catch onto what I am doing on Substack, starting to relate, starting to say the thing back to me that I thought I was the only one carrying. It is not huge. I am not fooling myself about that. But it is moving, the work is moving, and after a long time of shouting into a field with nothing coming back, it is small, but it is movement. The other wave is pulling out. The tiredness is real, the compression is real, and no amount of good news at the shoreline changes what my body is trying to tell me underneath it.
Because yesterday I took a personal day. Not for the poetry of it. I took it because I was falling asleep on the way to work, the actual wheel in my actual hands, the lane lines starting to smear, my head doing that slow nod that snaps back too late. That is not a metaphor. That is a man who has spent down more than he has coming in, and the body finally sent the bill to the front of the line where I could not pretend I did not see it.
And there was a second reason I stayed home, and I will only say it once. I did not want the exhaustion mistaken for being high. That shadow still stands next to me. It knows my body and my history, and it knows a tired man and a using man can wear the same slack face if you are not looking close. So I stayed home rather than hand anyone the chance to read me wrong. I am not angry about it. It is just the weather I walk in. Then I let it go, because the day was not about that.
The day was about this. The wave is pulling back, and I can feel it, and for the first time the feeling and the recognizing are two different things. I know what the receding used to lead to. I know the undertow that used to get a hand around my ankle every time the water went low. This time the water is leaving and the undertow is not coming for me. The wave is pulling back, but I am not being pulled back into who I was. That is the whole report. Not that I fixed it. Not that the tiredness is gone. Just that the tide can go out now without deciding who I am.
I am still tired. I am writing this tired, and the compression has not passed, and tomorrow I will probably feel the pull again and have to remember all of this from scratch. But the water can leave now and I stay where I am.
The wave pulls back, but this time it goes out without me.
From The Grey Zone
The Grey Zone is the space between certainty and mystery, the body and the signal running underneath it. There is more here now than the field notes. New tarot reading work, and some frequency healing rooms I have been building out, all of it coming from the same place this note came from. Come sit in it: https://thegreyzone.xyz
Tip the Kitchen
This one was written tired, which is most of them lately. If it put words to something you could not say out loud, you can help keep the Soup warm. One is enough: https://ko-fi.com/mastergreygray
Take what's useful. Leave what isn't.