autumnashes

I don’t know how to exist inside my own skin right now. My body hurts constantly—every joint, every nerve buzzing or burning in some private hell—and yet my emotions are stuck in this flat, gray fog. It feels like I’m floating a few feet outside of myself, detached, watching someone else limp through my days. I’m supposed to care about things, supposed to feel urgency, supposed to feel desire, but mostly I just feel… blank. A haze.

The hardest part is intimacy. Sex has always been a cornerstone of my identity, something that made me feel alive, connected, real. Now I lie beside people I love, people I want to want, and it’s like my body is a locked door. My brain remembers what it’s like to crave, but the signal doesn’t make it through. Instead I get this sense of obligation—this is who you are, this is what they expect, this is what you should be doing—while my body and spirit just won’t answer. I go through motions, or avoid them, and either way I feel like a fraud.

It’s disorienting: physical pain screaming from one side, emotional numbness pressing from the other. I’m caught in between, unable to move fully toward either. I don’t know how to bridge that gap, how to show up in love when I’m not even present in myself.

Some nights I wonder if this is permanent. If I’ll always be half-alive like this, longing for connection in theory but unable to touch it in practice. I miss desire like an old friend I can’t remember the face of.

For now, all I can do is write it here, admit it to myself. Maybe that’s a start.