Before I knew the word mother, I knew the difference between held and alone. Before I could pronounce I am frightened, fear had already moved into my bones. Before love had letters, I knew warmth against my cheek. Before I understood what leaving meant, I knew the silence after feet. The body was my first language. And somebody was teaching me before I knew I was being taught. That is the part I cannot stop thinking about. There was once a version of me with no vocabulary for pain. No please. No stop. No why. Just a nervous system taking notes in a language I would spend the rest of my life trying to translate. The body learned first. It learned which footsteps made the stomach pull tight. Which silence meant disappear. Which face meant soften yourself. Which sound meant make yourself smaller before whatever happens gets here. And I was so young I did not know this was learning. I thought this was simply what having a body felt like. God. There are things we survive before we have enough words to call them survival. So the body names them for us. A locked jaw means no. A held breath means wait. A racing heart means something is coming. Hands curled into fists mean please let me be strong enough. And sometimes thirty years later, nothing is coming. But the body has already answered. That is the cruelty of it. The room can be safe while the body is somewhere else. Someone can love you while your ribs prepare for loss. A hand can reach gently and some ancient part of your skin still remembers that hands have not always meant soft. How do you explain time to something that never learned calendars? How do you tell the heart, that was then, when the heart only knows again? I have tried. I have stood inside myself like a parent beside a frightened bed saying, nothing is here. nothing is happening. you can sleep. And still felt my pulse checking the locks. Still caught my lungs hiding air. Still found my shoulders halfway to my ears as if becoming smaller could make me disappear. And I used to hate myself for this. For being intelligent enough to know better and still not being able to feel better. I thought healing meant winning the argument. Thought if I found the perfect sentence, my body would finally surrender its evidence. But bodies do not speak in sentences. They speak in repetition. So perhaps I have to answer the same way. Again. Again. Again. A door slams. Nobody leaves. A voice rises. Nobody hurts me. I say no. Nobody punishes me. I make a mistake. Nobody withdraws their love. I cry too hard. Nobody calls me too much. I need something. Nobody makes me ashamed for having needs. Again. Again. Again. Until my body has accumulated more evidence of tenderness than terror. Until safety is no longer something I know intellectually but something my muscles do not question. Maybe healing is that ordinary. Not a revelation. An accumulation. A thousand tiny moments that seem like nothing to anyone who never needed proof. A hand that stops when I tense. A question asked instead of an assumption made. Someone saying I’m still here and then— this is important— still being there. Because before language, promises meant nothing. Presence did. Before I understood love, I understood return. Before I understood trust, I understood what happened after I cried. Before I knew the word safe, my body was already deciding whether the world deserved it. And perhaps that is why I cannot heal only with words. The wound is older than language. So the answer must sometimes be older too. Warmth. Breath. A hand offered, not taken. A door I am allowed to close. A room where nobody follows. A body beside mine that does not demand I become smaller to make room. And slowly— almost insultingly slowly— the oldest part of me begins revising its dictionary. Touch stops meaning danger. Quiet stops meaning waiting. Leaving stops meaning abandoned. Love stops meaning how much can you endure to keep it. And home— God. Maybe home becomes the first word my body learns twice. Once when I was too young to choose its definition. And again now, when I am finally old enough to teach myself what it should have meant. So I keep teaching. Not with speeches. With evidence. With mornings. With boundaries. With people who mean what they say. With nights where nothing happens and I slowly learn that nothing happening can be beautiful. Until someday a door closes and it is only a door. A hand reaches and it is only a hand. Someone loves me and my body does not immediately begin rehearsing how to lose them. Maybe that will be healing. Not forgetting the first language. Not erasing what it said. Just becoming fluent enough in tenderness that when my body whispers, something is coming, I can answer without words— and for once, it believes me.
