“The Mercy of Remembering”

The body is a beautifully calculated thing, and yet somehow remains a mystery.

It holds all the necessary parts for life itself while somehow carrying out thousands of unseen tasks as we sleep. It stitches wounds closed. Beats faithfully inside our chests without instruction. It grows entirely new humans from nothing more than hope, time, and cells.

It also ages, breaks, and stores things our minds often try desperately to forget. And still, it remembers the score with a devotion that feels almost holy.

It remembers joy tucked away for lean seasons. The scent of childhood homes. Songs. Grief we thought time had weathered smooth. The shape of hands no longer here.

…and traumas.

The ones we bury so deeply we convince ourselves they never existed.

But they did…And somehow the body knows.

I experienced one such trauma over Mother’s Day 2024.

Outwardly, my body healed.

Inside, it kept the receipt.

Now, for the past two years, my body seems to consult its own calendar months in advance, setting all the necessary alarms and preparing for storms my conscious mind has yet to notice.

Sleep suddenly becomes difficult.

Tears arrive without permission.

Panic escapes without regard for surroundings.

Lumps gather in my throat.

Food becomes impossible.

And I find myself wondering if I’m losing my mind.

Then I remember…All over again.

And in those moments of reactivity, I can’t help but ask: What is the purpose of this?

People survive terrible things every day.

War.

Car accidents.

The death of parents.

Difficult births.

Violence.

Betrayals.

The slow unraveling that happens inside relationships.

The kind of suffering that leaves you feeling alone on an island even if you’re surrounded by people. This is where life divides neatly into before and after, leaving the shell of who you used to be standing on the opposite shore.

And long after the danger has passed, the body often continues standing guard. After all, the nervous system does not care whether a date on the calendar marks celebration or catastrophe.

It only remembers:

This was when we were unsafe.

So it prepares.

Earlier.

Harder.

Louder.

But lately, after this last round of heart palpitations, I have wondered if perhaps it is something else entirely. Maybe these anniversaries are not proof that our bodies betray us. Maybe they are an invitation.

Maybe the body returns because it also keeps silent vigil over the parts of us we abandoned in order to survive. Because survival often demands fragmentation.

We compartmentalize. We numb. We minimize until the trauma becomes something we insist was small. Manageable. Irrelevant. And, just like that, we become astonishingly efficient at carrying impossible things.

Then sometimes, years later and seemingly out of nowhere, the body returns with trembling hands full of everything we fragmented and set down in the dark and whispers:

No, darling.

You survived.

But you aren’t whole…yet.

Try again.

Not as cruelty. Not as weakness.

But as mercy.

Perhaps what returns is not the trauma itself, but the grief, fear, and fractured pieces of us that never felt safe enough to be acknowledged. Because grief has a way of waiting patiently where we leave it—asking, over and over, to be witnessed before it loosens its grip.

And perhaps healing was never meant to be forgetting. Perhaps healing is standing in the ruins of what happened and allowing yourself to mourn what burned.

To stop measuring strength by how much pain you can carry without collapsing.

To believe in safety enough to unclench.

To become the version of yourself survival never had time to finish.

And maybe the body, in all its strange wisdom, refuses to let us skip that part because somewhere beneath the panic, sleepless nights, and tears that arrive without permission remains a quiet and stubborn belief:

You were always meant to be more than someone who survived.

You were meant to become whole.

To grieve what was lost.

To gather the scattered pieces and bring them home.

To rise from the ashes of what was—

and truly live again.

With you in the gathering,

Emily

Ash and Bloom