A Familiar Feeling
written by: Win Clay
The burn is a familiar feeling.
Like when I was young and didn’t know you.
I wept silently, mourned you only because you weren’t there with me. But you were still somewhere, and once the tears stopped, hope (though never as soft and comforting as your arms) picked me up.
I’m back where I started, except it’s so much worse now, because when I scream and sob violently, there is no thought of finding you, or comfort of your face in front of me. Your absence, my grief, presses my eyes closed, forces my head back against the too-warm pillow.
Your wife, who set her past aflame and didn’t bother to turn back and watch it burn, just took comfort in the heat—
For the first time, is looking behind, trying desperately to extinguish the blaze which I know will burn your soft flesh.
They say grief changes a person. I have always welcomed change.
But this is not evolution.
It is losing so much of me instead of gaining. I am reliving my youth in the worst way, being dragged back to Hell when you weren’t there.
PTSD, not nostalgia.
When you touched only my sleep, I was sad to wake but blessed to dream, clutching that fantasy close to my aching chest, wrapping it around me like a bandage until you finally came to knit my skin together with your lips.
Now, when I wake with tears in my eyes, ripped open again, I’m latching onto a memory instead of a dream, wound instead of bandage. Dreams burn bigger and brighter, but all memories do is fray, and fizzle out, and blacken at the edges.
I am in an alternate reality— Familiar, but wrong. So wrong. How dare the devil mess with my timeline, shove you into my past so unceremoniously, tangle you with all the rest of my unhappiness and rage.
Late at night, when the candles burned low, you whispered you’d light yourself on fire for me.
I never wanted you to.
I love you, and I will not be dragged back. I will drag you back, you melted, me charred, and save us both from the flames.
- A Familiar Feeling - November 29, 2025
