You have been holding something with your whole hand. Not gripping — that would require a decision, and this isn't a decision. This is older. This is the curl of fingers that happens in sleep, the fist forming around nothing at three a.m. because somewhere in the architecture of your nervous system a wall went up that never received the memo about peacetime. You wake with your palm aching. You think: I must have slept wrong. You didn't sleep wrong. You slept exactly the way the body sleeps when it has been on perimeter watch for years without relief

Here's what no one tells you about hypervigilance: it doesn't feel like fear. After enough time it feels like competence. You walk into a room and clock the exits before your jacket's off. You read the shift in someone's tone the way a sailor reads wind — not anxious, just good at this. You've been doing it since the kitchen table was at eye level and you could see the tendons in a grown hand tighten around a glass before the voice changed. That child had no language for what they were learning. They had a jaw. The back of a neck. The specific cold that blooms between the shoulder blades when the room drops three degrees and no one else notices.

That radar — that exquisite sensitivity to the emotional weather of any space you enter — became your bark. Grew right over the wound. You called it intuition. Called it being careful. Called it I just like to know what I'm walking into. True. And also the scar tissue talking, so practiced it forgot it was ever a wound response.

The bark kept you alive. The problem starts when the bark believes it is the whole tree.

There is a moment — and Woolf would have followed it for pages, the way light follows the curve of a spoon left on a sill — when something pushes past the bark without consulting you. You're standing in a parking lot, or mid-sentence at dinner, or pulling a shirt over your head, and the thing happens: you are suddenly, briefly, incandescently visible. Not performing. Not calibrating your volume to the room's tolerance. Just there. Full wattage, unfiltered, and it lasts maybe four seconds before the jaw re-engages, before the old software boots up and says too much, dial it back, you know better.

Four seconds. But in those four seconds you were the redbud splitting asphalt — living tissue exerting more pressure than the structure built to contain it. And the bloom didn't ask. That's the part that undoes you. The bloom didn't file a request. Didn't check whether the room was safe, whether the faces were friendly, whether the bark had signed off.

It just opened.

(The way a hand opens over a stone on an ordinary afternoon and light finds the palm with nothing to say about it — no praise, no punishment, just illumination landing where a moment ago there was a fist, and you standing there with your whole chest exposed to the weather, and the weather not giving a damn, and that — that — being the most terrifying tenderness you've felt in months.)

So here it is: you are not protecting the bloom. You think you are. You've built a whole system — elegant, invisible to anyone who hasn't built the same one — and you believe, at the cellular level, that without the guard the radiance would be destroyed. That the world would do what the world has done before. That the love is too loud, the self too specific, too queer, too bright, too damn much for rooms that never expanded to fit you.

But the bloom is already out.

It was out when you laughed too hard last Tuesday and your body convulsed with it before you could flatten yourself. It was out when you wore that color. When you touched someone's face with your actual hand instead of your careful hand. The radiance has been escaping for years, slipping through every crack like redbud through concrete, and the only one who hasn't registered this is you — still guarding a door that is already, irreversibly, open.

Not a question today. A fact. The hand is open and the stone is still there and the light is on your palm and the bark doesn't know yet that its job has changed. Not disappeared. Changed. It guards the roots now. Not the petals. The petals are so far out they are embarrassing, rude with color, the thing people drive across counties to witness, and you are still crouched at the base of yourself whispering be careful, be careful to a bloom that stopped listening to you somewhere around the second or third time it split you open without asking.

The hand is open. You didn't open it.

The voices woven into this work:

🌿 Poetry and Feelings: thepoetmiranda.com
🌿 Personal Queer Journey: thistleandfern.org
🌿 Life Banter: brandonellrich.substack.com
🌿 Lisa's Porch Talk: wuzzittoya.org / wuzzittoya.substack.com
🌿 Presence Not Permission: presencenotpermission.beehiiv.com

Become a member: thistleandmoss.com/upgrade