Brie Nicole Inked

I have been wearing the wrong skin again, pulling it tighter each morning until the seams bite. Somewhere between the arithmetic of survival and the fluorescent hunger of wanting, I misplaced the shape of myself. The world keeps pouring itself down my throat—silver noise, borrowed faces, little mechanical heavens—and I keep swallowing, swallowing, swallowing, as if enough of it might finally make me belong.

But something underneath me refuses to be civilized. Something dark-rooted and nameless keeps scratching at the floorboards, leaving crescents where there should be silence. It does not speak in numbers. It speaks in weather. In the low animal pulse beneath stone. In the language of things that do not need to explain themselves to exist. I feel it sometimes, just before sleep, when the machinery inside my skull loses its teeth and something older rises through the cracks.

I want to go where the horizon has no obligation to mean anything. Where time is a wound that closes slowly. Where my hands can remember a language my mind has forgotten. I want to touch something unprocessed, something that has not passed through a screen or been polished into wanting. Let me have the roughness. Let me have the splinters. Let something leave a mark on me that isn’t measured in digits.

There are days when the world feels like a mouth held open too long, waiting for me to feed it another piece of myself. I am tired of arriving with empty hands and being told they are not empty enough. Tired of carrying invisible architecture on my back. Tired of building staircases toward rooms I never wanted to enter. Somewhere inside me, a door keeps opening onto nothing but dark water, and still I step through.

Perhaps belonging was never a place. Perhaps it is the moment the noise loosens its grip and I can finally hear the strange, subterranean rhythm beneath it all. Something without a name. Something without a price. Something breathing beneath the wreckage, patient as roots, stubborn as hunger, waiting for me to stop asking the world what I am worth.

I think I am beginning to understand the ache.

It is not asking me to escape.

It is asking me to remember.