Why can’t I feel things viscerally anymore?

I mindlessly lapped suburbia for hours searching for the answer, only to come home with rug burn on the sides of my heels and a splitting headache. It’s a scary thing, cold, removed, to beg yourself to feel what it is that you’re feeling. To forget what that’s like is worse.

I miss myself in ways I can no longer understand. That intensity, the way emotion burned in my chest, did I dream that? Memories of who I was, echoes of sensations I used to feel, they are falling through my fingers faster than I can use them as proof: that life was mine, and I want it back.

What sits comfortably in my palm still is how I was never indifferent. Not once. It was exhausting in a purposeful way; writing every night with such fervor about all the reverberating words and touches was ritualistic. I’d watch as new details of my life spread and wove in front of me like a spectacularly confounding web that I could only try to comprehend. This slowed down time. Made it tangible, my friend. Now, I’m always falling behind. Weeks pass before I begin to process what I know certainly must be important? I should probably write about that at some point. But it’s blurry now—lost.

Between houses, in the faces of dogs in windows, in the setting sun, I was looking for something easy, something reversible. The one thread I could pull to undo all the knots and nonsense, returning to a previous configuration. Knowing good and well that there was nothing I’d find, I submerged myself, inch by inch, step by step, into the processing of this unavoidable truth: