Something can be off for a long time before you notice.

You eat. You answer. You laugh at the right places.

And underneath, a thinness you cannot name, like a room with the heat turned a few degrees too low.

You can spend years like this. Standing slightly to the left of yourself. Watching someone who looks like you move through your hours, sign your name, kiss the people you love on the forehead.

What brings you back isn't insight.

It's staying.

A few minutes with one thing. Not fixing it. Not solving it. Just remaining.

The cup in your hands. The weight of it. The small heat through the ceramic.

And then the coffee has a temperature again.

The light in the room has a direction.

The grief you were carrying, or the worry, or whatever has been sitting on your chest for weeks, gets smaller. Not because anything changed. Because you stopped running from it long enough for it to soften.

You were never gone.

You were just somewhere the mind could not follow while it was running.

And the part of you that has been waiting, quietly, for you to come home, does not ask where you have been.

It just sets down a chair.