The Weight of Unspoken Wounds

The prickle of truth arrives the same way winter does—slow, creeping, and unnoticed until it has settled across the skin.

There is a moment, always, when the heart realizes it’s colder than the world around it.

A moment when old words—careless, sharp, or simply untrue—turn into tiny knives of frost.

I felt that again today.

The air stood still, the same way memories do when they refuse to leave.

A quiet shiver ran through me, the kind that doesn’t come from weather but from the weight of everything left unsaid.

It’s strange how a body remembers pain more vividly than warmth—

how the soul freezes before the season even changes.

**

Outside, the world was preparing for sleep.

Trees shedding their last gold, birds folding their songs, daylight thinning like fragile paper.

Nature retreats gently, gracefully—

nothing like the abrupt withdrawal of a wounded heart.

Sometimes I wish emotions had seasons too.

That grief would knock before entering.

That disappointment would melt with spring.

That healing would announce its arrival the same way Indian Summer does—

soft, surprising, golden around the edges.

But people are not weather.

We break differently.

**

I walked along the empty road behind my house, letting the leaves crunch beneath my feet.

Every sound felt like a whispered truth I once ignored.

There was a time when I believed strength meant staying silent,

that the weight of unspoken wounds wasn’t heavy enough to crush me.

But silence is deceptive.

It collects.

It freezes.

It buries the heart under layers of invisible snow.

**

When evening came, I lit a small fire in the backyard.

The smoke curled upward like breaths I’d been holding for years.

I sat with it—

the cold, the warmth, the contradiction of being human.

And for once, I didn’t run from my own thoughts.

The flames didn’t ask me to be strong.

The wind didn’t demand explanations.

The night didn’t shame me for feeling too much.

Everything simply… existed.

And that felt like the closest thing to peace I’ve had in a long while.

**

Winter arrived quietly this year.

No dramatic entrance, no violent storm—

just a gentle settling, the way truths eventually settle into the soul.

And somehow, in that calm, I understood something:

Not every wound needs words.

Not every ache needs an audience.

Some pain is meant to be felt, acknowledged,

and then slowly released—

like breath fogging in the cold, fading into the vastness of the sky.

**

Tonight, I surrendered to the stillness.

To the cold that doesn’t hurt but cleanses.

To the pause life forces upon us when we’ve carried too much for too long.

In this quiet season,

I learned that even frozen moments hold beauty—

and that healing doesn’t arrive with a roar.

It comes softly, patiently,

like winter settling upon the mantle of the world.

This time,

I am ready to feel it all.

And finally—

to let some of it go.