Sourdough

Have you ever kneaded dough?

It feels like battered skin,

except dough never bruises.

No matter how hard the fist.

No matter how often it folds

into itself.

That's what breathing feels like.

Every inhale,

a thousand needles

checking whether flesh

still intends

to remain flesh.

The strange thing about wounds

is how much easier they are

when they bleed.

A cut knows what it is.

A scab leaves evidence.

Pain becomes real

the moment it stains something.

But how do you heal

from

what consumes everything

and leaves everything behind?

How do you dress a wound

that never breaks the skin?

They say

you should speak.

Talk to people.

Give it language.

Give it shape.

They say it helps.

As though naming a thing

is the same as surviving it.

How do you describe a black hole

without borrowing the language

of stars?

How do you explain a scream

that never becomes sound?

How do you put into words

what survived poetry?

Some wounds

arrive with blood.

Others arrive with silence.

Only one of them

gets believed.

The cruel thing about survival

is that people mistake it

for recovery.

They see you breathing

and call it healing, 

assume the drowning ended.

They see you standing, 

and call it redemption,

assume the collapse is over.

But survival is not the opposite of dying.

Sometimes

it is just dying

that learns to continue

with remarkable consistency.

The part no one tells you about survival 

is that

sometimes

the instinct to keep breathing 

is what keeps the wound alive too.