Restored
Something nearly carnivorous awakens when another soul finds the key to the locked room you had long forgotten.
You feel gently reached for while being accurately ravished.
Like someone slipping a skeleton key through the immaculate facade of your composure, only to cradle the feral, dust-covered thing you’ve kept hidden behind the door.
Most people encounter this kind of depth and immediately feel it as danger.
Because the feeling was never the calamity. The calamity was discovering how much of yourself had been entombed alive.
It was uncovering the subterranean sanctuaries within yourself, still capable of resonance, still fevered with appetite, still obedient to the sound of being deeply known.
To long for another person with that degree of ruinous gravity is not proof that something within you is lacking. It is proof your inner world survived the exile, survived the sedation.
There are people who spend entire lifetimes administering emotional anesthesia to themselves, shrinking their emotional perimeter, becoming less porous, less volatile, less reachable, whittling their vastness down into something socially digestible, something housebroken enough to never again be wounded by wonder.
Then suddenly, like divine misconduct, someone arrives carrying the exact resonance necessary to make every sleeping organ of longing begin vibrating again, whose very presence reanimates every starved instrument beneath your skin.
Now the body resurrects its oldest memory of longing. Now every nerve burns like a midnight basilica brimming with feverish candles.
Now softness and sorrow become indistinguishable. Desire holds the hand of dread, while devotion drags itself toward permanence through the unbearable act of being seen, reverence fused to nakedness.
What they call obsession is often just the horrifying realization that someone has made them emotionally legible to themselves.
I can no longer hide from the magnitude of my own capacity to feel.
Because depth does not dismantle a person. It only illuminates how much of themselves was waiting in the dark.
The true collapse begins when the heart is forced underground, through the suffocating mechanics of suppression: through swallowed confessions, through love forced into concealment, through pretending not to care long after care has rooted itself like mycelium through the skin.
And perhaps that is why yearning feels so mortifying to the human animal, because it exposes need in a culture obsessed with invulnerability.
The terror is not abandonment. The terror is surrender. The existential violence of loving someone enough to never fully return to who you were before.
Most sacred human experiences begin beneath the threshold of comprehension. They are subtle disturbances: muted, uncertain, slipping through microscopic ruptures in the self.
Until, at some unbearable hour,
you stand inside the beautiful debris of your old defenses, realizing what felt like destruction was actually the soul making room for occupancy.
And you realize you were not actually ruined, but resurrected.