Her Awakening

She sat for a while waiting. She wasn’t sure what she was waiting for, but she sat still, deathly quiet and seemingly immobile. There was a silent resolve at that moment. For all of these years, she had been waiting for something to shift. She was waiting to feel like herself. But did she know who herself was? 

“Who am I?” She thought. 

The question silently arose until it demanded to be asked again.

“Who am I?” This time she asked herself out loud.

The sound of her own voice sparked something in her. Did she feel that? What was that? Perhaps it was the sound of her voice in the quiet room, maybe it was the question itself but something within her awoke. It slowly simmered building in current, building in steam, until it rose up from the depth of her throat. At that moment she stood and what once was a slight simmer now roared from the depths of her soul. 

“Who the fuck am I?” 

And with the final vowel came a primal sound, the sound of pure pain, agony, affliction. It was the sound of a woman awakening. 

All of the sounds she had held back came now. “I’ve wasted, I’ve wasted, I’ve wasted so much time!” She heaved the words between tears. 

The pain of the moment brought her to her knees, wrapped her over into a tight ball of pain. Every breath, every tear wrecked her body until she lay immobile.  She lay there, for seconds, perhaps for hours there was no concept of time, of space, or energy. 

Her body limp, soft and quiet, she took a shuddering breath and began to move. She didn’t want to lose the pain. She wanted to remember it. She wanted to hold onto it so that she would never return to this moment. 

Because when you forget the pain, you forget the reasons that brought you to it, and at that moment, she needed to feel. She needed to see herself as she was. Lost, silent, hurting, alone, but awakening.