The words

A poem about language as a doorway back into feeling.

This piece explores the strange way words sometimes arrive before understanding does. They may seem small, incomplete, or only approximate at first, but they can still point toward something real beneath the surface.

There are experiences we stop knowing how to feel directly—not because they are gone, but because some part of us had to place them out of reach in order to survive.

In that sense, words can become more than expression.

They can become evidence.

Evidence that something exiled still exists. Evidence that silence is not emptiness. Evidence that what was once severed from awareness may be ready to return.

This poem has grown more meaningful to me with time.

When I first wrote it, I think I understood it mostly as a poem about recovering emotions.

Now I think it is also about trust.

Trust that there are parts of us we do not currently have access to and that this does not mean they are gone.

I am increasingly interested in the way language can function as a kind of threshold.

• Sometimes a word names something we already understand.
• Other times, the word comes first.

It arrives like a shape in the fog. Not the whole truth, not the whole feeling, but enough of an outline that something inside us begins to recognize itself.

This poem lives in that second kind of language.

The words here are not treated as final answers. They are proxies. Stand-ins. Small openings into something more embodied than speech.

• I no longer think language exists primarily to explain experience.
• Sometimes language exists to reveal it.

What matters most to me now is the question at the end:

What did you find beneath them?

Because the words themselves are not the destination.

They are the invitation to listen deeper—to the body, the heart, the old ache, the forgotten feeling, the part of the self that may have been waiting a long time to be found again.

Evidence, perhaps, that something beneath numbness is still alive.

Evidence that there are parts of ourselves still waiting to be remembered.

Evidence that what feels absent may only be waiting for a different route back.