The Things That Wake Us

Notes from the Hollow Bone | entry forty-nine

Tonight I sat alone speaking softly into my own shadow.

Not because I have lost touch with reality.

Quite the opposite.

Perhaps for the first time in a long time, I feel startlingly awake inside it.

There is someone who has entered my life quietly.

No grand declarations.
No dramatic unraveling.
No crossing of lines that cannot be uncrossed.

Only presence.

Conversation stretched across long hours.
Music filling silence gently instead of demanding attention.
A glance that lingers just long enough for the nervous system to notice.
The strange intimacy of feeling both calm and electrified in the same person’s presence.

And I have spent weeks trying to understand what exactly it is that has overtaken me.

At first, I believed this was simply longing.

The old familiar ache.

The kind artists romanticize because yearning itself can become beautiful when it has nowhere to go.

But the more honestly I sit with myself, the more I realize this is not entirely about him.

He is the catalyst.

The awakening is happening within me.

Because somewhere along the way, I convinced myself that independence was the highest form of healing.

I told myself I was strong alone.
Whole alone.
Complete alone.

And in many ways, that was true.

But buried underneath that strength was another truth I rarely allowed myself to say aloud:

I still wanted love.

Not validation.
Not saving.
Not possession.

Love.

The kind that softens the body instead of tightening it.
The kind that makes the spirit feel witnessed.
The kind that turns ordinary moments—songs in a car, shared laughter, a lingering silence—into small sacred things.

And perhaps that is why this connection unsettled me so deeply.

Not because it promised permanence.

But because it reminded me I was still capable of being moved.

Still capable of anticipation.
Of tenderness.
Of wanting someone near me simply because their existence alters the atmosphere around me.

There is a dangerous beauty in that kind of awakening.

Especially when the connection lives inside unfinished space.

Because unfinished things leave room for fantasy to breathe.
For projection.
For myth.
For the heart to survive on fragments and call them enough.

And I am aware of that.

I know proximity intensifies emotion.
I know longing can become intoxicating.
I know the mind can replay certain moments over and over trying to stretch feeling beyond the moment that created it.

But I also know this:

There is nothing shameful about loving what awakens you.

Even if it was never meant to stay.

Even if it never fully becomes yours.

Some people enter our lives not to remain forever, but to reopen forgotten rooms inside us.

To remind us that the heart, despite everything, still knows how to answer beauty when it appears.

And perhaps that is the lesson resting quietly beneath all of this.

Not whether this connection survives.
Not whether it deepens.
Not whether reality ever catches up to the electricity living inside possibility.

But simply this:

I am still capable of feeling wonder.

And tonight, strangely enough, that feels like healing.

With Grace & Ink,
— Mai