But Nothing Can Capture The Sting

I’ll get straight to the point. My life has turned around.

In a really good way.

If I could say anything to Bri from September ’24, I’d just give her a glimpse of what March has been like.

She wouldn’t have thought that the future was just an extension of the present, unchanging, unmoving, a loop that never ends.

She would have known that the loop breaks, even when it feels like it won’t. That things shift.

But September Bri wouldn’t have believed me. She would have thought I was trying to be poetic to make her feel better. And in a way, maybe I would have been. Because what do you even say to someone who thinks they’re staring down an endless corridor? That they just have to walk a little further? That there’s an opening somewhere? That the walls aren’t actually closing in, even if it feels like they are?

I wouldn’t have tried to explain. I would have just given her a glimpse.

Maybe that would have been enough.

Maybe she would have stopped thinking that the present was forever.

My head has been sounding a lot like ‘The Sailor Song.’ And no, it’s not the chorus. (Though I wish it was.)

“But lately I've tried other things but nothing can capture the sting.”

The sting.

It’s funny, how we all have one. And how it changes.

For most people, the sting shifts shape. It morphs. It evolves.

Mine remains the same.

I went to a relative’s house the other day. Their walls were covered in scribbles and doodles, every inch filled, at least as far as their kid could reach. I laughed. It was the kind of laugh that escapes before you even register it, before you think about what it means.

And then they said, “Bri, you scribbled all over your dad’s rented flat and he had to paint it all with your mom when you all shifted.”

And suddenly, I could very clearly remember a picture.

Me, in my Ryan International uniform, the widest smile on my face, holding a crayon bigger than my head, posing by that very wall. A masterpiece of looping letters and wobbly shapes. My name, written and rewritten, because I loved the way the letters looked when I made them big. A house with lopsided windows. A sun too large for the sky. My world, in color.

Is that the sting?

I’ve been chasing a feeling which in my heart, I know exactly what it is.

But I won’t tell you.

Because if I say it out loud, it will make it real.

And if it’s real, then I have to acknowledge that I will never get it back.

That crayon was so big. And I was so small. And that wall was endless. A blank canvas that belonged to me in a way no space ever truly has since. No rules, no second thoughts, just the confidence of a child who believes anything she touches can be hers.

I wonder how long it stayed before my father sighed and bought the paint, before my mother scrubbed at the corners where the color wouldn’t fade. Did they laugh while they did it, or did they shake their heads, tired, already carrying the weight of things I was too young to understand?

I was always leaving something behind without knowing it.

That house. That wall. That version of me.

I think about her, sometimes. The girl with the crayon, before she knew about permanence and loss, before she understood that sometimes, you can’t go back and see the things you left exactly as they were.

Does she know what she has?

I want to tell her, but I know she wouldn’t listen. She’s too busy making the sun too big for the sky.

And maybe that’s the way it should be.

Maybe that’s the sting.

And it’s not just the wall. It’s the uniform, the way it felt, the stiffness of the collar, the way the pleats never stayed in place. It’s the house, the way the floors clicked under my tiny shoes. It’s the smell of the air in the evening, the distant sound of cartoons on TV, the unshakable belief that I would always belong there.

It was mine. And then it wasn’t.

And I will never get it back.

But for a second, I do.

It’s been slipping through my fingers for years, but the thing about nostalgia is that it tricks you into thinking it’s still within reach. That if you go back to the right places, the right songs, the right stories, you can step into the past like it’s just another room in the house.

But the doors don’t open the way they used to.

You go back and everything is smaller.

The walls you thought were endless are just walls.

The past exists, but only as an echo, a faded outline of something you can’t quite grasp anymore.

And that is the sting.

(One of them, the others are blogs for another time, maybe.)

The sting comes back from time to time.

I want to tell September Bri that she’ll be okay.

That March Bri is standing in the light. That she’s breathing and laughing and waking up without her chest feeling so heavy that it’s hard to get out of bed.

I want to tell her that she will write again. That she will find words in places she thought had run dry.

She will get up in the morning and feel something other than dread. She will get on calls and not feel the need to rehearse the right responses in her head before she speaks. She will step outside, not because she has to, but because she wants to. And the world won’t seem so sharp-edged, so loud, so exhausting.

That she won’t always feel like she’s watching the world through a window, separate, apart. That one day, she will step outside and realize she belongs to it again.

I’ll be honest with you, I try not to feel the “nostalgia” but I’ve been failing and I do not know what to make of it.

Because it’s not fun. I do not like it.

I’ve tried a lot of other things.

But nothing can capture the sting.

I have tried to outrun it. I have tried to drown it with music, in distractions, in filling my calendar so full that there is no space left for it to creep in.

But the thing about the sting is that it does not need an invitation.

It waits.

In the pauses, in the quiet, in the moments when the world slows down just enough for it to slip through the cracks.

And I do not know what to make of it.

I do not know if I am supposed to fight it or sit with it or let it settle into the spaces of me that are still healing.

Maybe it is both. Maybe the sting is not something to be outrun but something to be understood. Maybe it will always be there, in some form or another, shifting, changing, but never truly leaving.

Or maybe, one day, I will wake up and find that it has softened into something else. Something smaller. Something quieter. Something that no longer stops me in my tracks.

I am okay, and I will be.

Why?

I’ll find a way.