anxious (adj.) - 1620s, "greatly troubled by uncertainties," from Latin anxius "solicitous, uneasy, troubled in mind" (also "causing anxiety, troublesome"), from angere, anguere "to choke, squeeze," figuratively "to torment, cause distress" (from PIE root *angh- "tight, painfully constricted, painful").
I learned the weather by your footsteps,
how the floorboards spoke before you did,
how silence could mean safety
or the eye of something breaking.
charting storms no one else could see—
the wrathful darkness in your voice,
the beer set down too hard,
the way night could tilt without warning.
I became small in the right ways,
A careful architect of calm,
stacking peace like fragile dishes
no one must hear me drop.
I folded them into corners,
tucked them behind apologies
that weren’t mine to carry.
Hyper-aware, hyper-ready,
like a wire stretched thin
between disaster and control
Now I walk through quiet rooms
and still listen for echoes—
for something that isn’t there
They call it patterns, disorders, names—
but I know it as muscle memory:
And still, somewhere beneath it,
who thought peace was their responsibility,
who believed love could be stabilized
if they just tried harder.
that I can set the glass down loudly,
that I can need without apology,
without me becoming the sky.
I learned the shape of dread
by watching the people I loved
without leaving the house.
I became the child who vanished
before anyone could remember
I carried the atmosphere.
I could taste the shift in a room
before a single word was spoken.
This is what survival looked like:
flinching before the strike,
hearing danger in kindness
and calling it intuition.
and the past still lives in my nerves.
It wakes inside me as vigilance,
as sorrow without a funeral,
as a mind that cannot stop
preparing for catastrophe.
arrives with a storm behind it.
So I became a room with no light in it.
A house with all its windows covered.
A body trained to disappear
before grief could find it.
And still, the child in me
for the sound of someone breaking.
