For weeks I kept it contained. The big feelings came at predictable hours — three forty-one in the morning, a locked door, the tap running so no one would hear. Managed. Let out in measured amounts and put away again before anyone woke.
The day it stopped being containable, there was a thunderstorm overhead.
We were back home by then, after three months away, and the house had that long-absence stillness — dust on every surface, every room waiting to be reclaimed. My office was the worst of it: cold, fluorescent, built years earlier by a version of me who valued output and nothing else. A mortuary. I had sat in it for thousands of hours. Standing in the doorway now, I wanted nothing to do with it.
That afternoon the rain came the way it comes there in spring — total, immediate, without warning. The way feelings arrive now. I put on a song I’d played a hundred times before without it ever meaning anything. In another language, about killing your demons. About being an angel in hell and forgetting your own name.
This time it didn’t wait.
It all arrived at once. Fifty-two years of a feeling channel that had been flatline, suddenly fully online. Grief for years I had been present for and somehow absent from. And underneath it, the fragility of the whole thing — how close I had come to never knowing at all, one line in a clinical table almost read past, the dark simply continuing. I didn’t manage it this time. I didn’t run the tap. I let it fall.
Then I turned the music off and sat in the silence. The rain kept going. And something had moved through me — not fixed, not resolved, but moved.
That evening two of my children drifted into the kitchen. Not summoned. Just there, choosing the same room. There was stew on the stove because everyone was hungry, and something cheerful playing because it felt right, and somewhere between the stirring and the laughing the day found its other end.
It had started with the flood. It ended with kitchen noise.
That, it turns out, is the whole skill — not stopping the storms, but staying in the room until they pass, and noticing what is still there when they do.
