She'd been numb for so long she'd forgotten she'd been numb.
That is the particular problem with numbness — it presents itself as normal. The absence of sensation becomes the baseline. You stop missing what you don't remember having.
She'd spent years in the flat grey of it. Functioning. Managing. Meeting the requirements of a life without the quality of aliveness she'd had as a child, as a teenager, in certain earlier years — the quality that felt like light coming through something.
She didn't know how to explain what changed it. An accumulation of small things. The therapy, which was slow and unglamorous. The running, which she'd taken up because someone told her to and which she'd hated for six months before something shifted. The morning practice, which was five minutes at first and then ten and then longer.
One morning she was making tea — ordinary morning, ordinary tea — and she felt her hands.
Not felt pain or temperature — felt them. The aliveness in them. The particular energy that is always there but that she had not been aware of for a very long time.
She stood at the kettle with her hands around the mug and felt the aliveness moving in her and understood that it had been there the whole time. Under the numbness. Under the flat grey. Not lost.
Waiting.
She was crying and she didn't entirely know why.
She made the tea. She sat with it. She felt her hands.
She had come back to herself.
Aliveness doesn't leave you. You leave it. And then you can return.
