Healing and Breaking

There was something cinematic about my collapse.

You know the kind. The aching stare into space. The playlist suddenly making sense. Ashtrays filling up like metaphors. That slow descent where even your breath feels like dialogue from a French indie film. You can romanticize that. You can write about that.

But healing? Healing is brushing your teeth. Again. It's drinking water when it doesn't taste like anything. It’s putting your phone down because there’s nothing to say and nothing to scroll for. It’s the slow erosion of the version of you that needed chaos to feel alive.

No one writes songs about oatmeal. No one makes a montage out of "I got out of bed today." You sit in silence. You count breaths. You rearrange the furniture hoping something inside moves with it.

And yet—this is where life actually begins again. Not at the peak of the heartbreak, but somewhere on the third Tuesday after it, when you realize you haven't cried in a week and you’re not sure how that happened. When you laugh, but not like a revelation—more like a slip. An accident. Like healing tripped into you.

I used to think I was more me when I was broken. That the cracked version had more meaning, more edge. But I see now that was just noise disguised as depth. Grief performs. Healing disappears.

There’s no poetry in stability. Just the steady, unphotogenic rhythm of not collapsing.

And maybe that’s the most human thing of all.