There are nights when my mind doesn’t so much think as it wanders—quietly, like a stray animal, unsure of whether it’s welcome. Thoughts drift like smoke in an abandoned room—aimless, fragrant, impossible to catch. They curl into the corners of my brain, wafting through the wreckage of old memories, clinging to the peeling wallpaper of things I no longer speak aloud. The kind of memories that don’t knock before entering.

There’s a stillness to that kind of mental drift—a weightless ache. Like being in a house that no longer has electricity, but still holds onto the heat from a fire long since burned out. The walls remember voices. The floorboards creak not from footsteps, but from loneliness. That’s what my head feels like most nights—inhabited, but not lived in.

Some memories hit like sirens. Others, like the low hum of a radio station just out of range. That’s what it’s like when you’ve seen too much, and spoken too little. The mind doesn’t store trauma in neat folders—it leaves it strewn across the floor, like paperwork in an office that someone left in a hurry. You don’t clean it up, you simply learn to carefully step over it.

I used to think healing was some sort of linear process—a checklist I could easily get through through like a structure fire. Step one, get in. Step two, find the source. Step three, extinguish. But trauma doesn’t burn out. It simmers. It finds oxygen in quiet moments, and reignites when the world goes still.

There are places I can’t return to—not physically, not emotionally, but at least ten minutes out of every single day, my thoughts go there anyway. They revisit the rooms I’ve boarded up, looking for something I forgot to carry out. Sometimes it’s a face, sometimes a name, sometimes just a feeling. A feeling of being stared at by the past through a keyhole in the door you thought you had shut.

I have learned to let the smoke drift. To let the memories rise and vanish, instead of choking on them. I no longer try to catch each thought, catalog it, or make it make sense. Some things aren’t meant to be understood. Some things are meant to haunt you a little, just to remind you that you felt something real once.

There’s a freedom in not needing answers. There’s a truth in just standing still, breathing in the smoke, and letting it sting your eyes for a moment before you move on.

That’s the kind of woman I am now. The kind who doesn’t need to light fires just to feel warm. The kind who walks through abandoned places—inside and out—and still sees beauty in what’s left behind. Not because it’s pretty. But because it’s real.

And I’ll always choose real, even if it smells like smoke, and hurts like hell.