The Familiar Storm

Notes from the Hollow Bone | entry forty-four

There are moments when I can feel it before I fully understand it—not the noise, but the quiet beneath it. The kind that doesn’t reach for me, doesn’t ask me to become anything more than what I already am. No shaping. No softening. No offering of myself in pieces. Just presence.

And I recognize that feeling now. It’s the same one I once thought I was searching for.

And still—I don’t stay.

Not because it isn’t peaceful, but because it leaves me with nothing to do. No role to step into. No version of myself to present. No movement to follow. Just me—unmet, unmasked, uncertain.

And there is a part of me that doesn’t yet know how to exist there without reaching for something to hold onto.

So I do what I’ve always done. I move. I think. I shape the moment into something I can recognize. I return to what feels familiar—not because it is better, but because it is known. Because there is a strange comfort in being defined, even if that definition is not entirely true.

Because in the familiar storm, I know where I stand. I know how to move. I know how to be seen. And I don’t have to face what remains when all of that falls away.

I used to think this was failure. That if I couldn’t stay in that quiet, then I wasn’t doing it right. But I’m beginning to see it differently.

This isn’t failure.

It’s the moment before trust. The moment where nothing is required of me, and I have to decide if I believe that. If I can exist without earning my place. If I can remain without becoming something more palatable. If I can stay in what is freely given.

I don’t always stay.

But I notice now the moment I leave.

And maybe that’s where it begins.

— a fragment from the same silence —

The Familiar Storm

I touched the quiet—
it did not form.

Suspended,
unknown.

So I chose
the familiar storm.

There, the masks
fall into place.

The moon rises—
unchased…

And being unnamed
has no shape.

With Grace & Ink,

Mai