Entry 03: If My Body Could Speak Back
Translation / Aftermath
I don’t really wake up.
Not all at once.
It’s more like I get pulled back into my body in pieces.
One part of me is already here. Another part is still gone somewhere I can’t reach.
And I can feel the gap before I can think about it.
My muscles are the first thing that hurt.
Not sharp.
Just wrong.
Like they’ve been used without me being aware enough to agree to it.
Jaw tight. Neck stiff. Arms heavy in a way that doesn’t belong to sleep.
It doesn’t feel like rest.
It feels like something happened while I wasn’t fully there for it.
The room is real.
But I don’t trust it immediately.
That’s the worst part.
I have to check reality against myself.
Light. Bed. Hands. Breath.
Like I’m trying to confirm I’m actually back and not still stuck in whatever came before.
My brain is already racing before I’m fully online.
Trying to fill in missing pieces I don’t have.
Did I wake up in the night?
Did I sit up and not remember?
Did something happen and I just… didn’t get to hold it?
It doesn’t give me answers.
It gives me anxiety instead.
That’s how it always starts.
Not fear first.
Confusion first.
Then my body reacts like confusion means danger.
Chest tightens. Breath shortens.
Like my system is trying to catch up to something it thinks I should already understand.
Sometimes there’s a gap.
Not a dramatic one.
Just missing time.
And I hate how normal that word has become to me.
Missing.
Like I stepped out of myself and forgot where I put the rest.
I try to feel for clues in my body.
Soreness that doesn’t make sense.
Fatigue that sits deeper than sleep should allow.
That drained, scraped-out feeling like something ran through the night and I was only partially present for it.
And I don’t always know what it was until I’m already here trying to recover from it.
My thoughts don’t line up.
They stack on top of each other too fast.
Anxiety fills every silence with possibilities I don’t want.
What if I had a seizure and didn’t fully come back?
What if I was awake but not able to respond?
What if I was gone longer than I know?
It doesn’t feel imagined when I’m this tired.
It feels real enough to sit in my body.
And that’s when it gets hard to separate anything.
Sleep deprivation.
Seizure aftermath.
Anxiety.
They don’t stay in their own places.
They overlap until I can’t tell which one I’m reacting to.
Just that I’m reacting.
Just that something in me is not settled.
There are moments I almost remember.
Not full memories.
Fragments.
Feeling aware but unreachable.
Hearing things like they’re far away, underwater, behind glass.
Knowing people were there, but not being able to connect back to them the way I wanted to.
That part lingers even when everything else fades.
And my body doesn’t explain itself.
It never does.
It just exists in the aftermath.
Heavy. Sore. Off balance.
Like it carried something through the night without my awareness fully attached to it.
Anxiety tries to take over the space between what I know and what I don’t.
It fills the missing pieces with noise.
Because silence feels worse when I can’t account for what happened in it.
But even through all of that—
there’s still the fact that I came back.
Not clean.
Not whole in one piece.
But here.
Still here.
Trying to match myself back together from whatever my body went through without me fully awake to follow it.
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