Cartography of Confusion

when the rooms inside me rearrange themselves
without my leave —
a chair in the kitchen becomes an ocean,
a doorway folds into a question —
I learn again how to be lost in my own house.

I keep a map of feelings in my pocket —
folded so many times the creases look like rivers.
Sometimes the map is blank:
no labels, no legend, only the faint print
of footsteps I can’t place.

I move through the day like a borrowed voice,
sounding correct but hollow,
as if someone stitched curtains over my ribs.
Air arrives at my mouth and I forget the word for breathing.
My hands are small islands that won’t hold onto anything.

Everything is too loud and also mute —
traffic that muffles a heartbeat, a calendar that yells in numbers,
the refrigerator humming the tune of every decision I didn’t make.
There is a pressure behind my eyes like an incoming storm,
and I check the sky for reasons it hasn’t given me.

I want to be honest about what I am —
not brave, not broken enough to show a clean fracture,
only a soft, persistent bruising under the skin.
I tell myself I should name it: anxiety, grief, fatigue —
but names sound like labels on jars I do not trust.

At night the ceiling becomes an auditorium of questions.
I sit under them, small and surprised,
feeling the weight of possibility and failure mixed together,
as if the future is a stranger who keeps touching my shoulder,
testing whether I will turn and recognize them.

Sometimes I rage at my own indecision —
I want the tempest and the anchor at once,
to hurl myself toward change and to be held still by certainty.
I am tired of choosing nothing because choosing feels like a verdict.
It is easier to drift between options than to be judged by one.

And yet there are brief, scandalous lights —
a laugh that fractures the blue of the day,
a hand that finds mine in a grocery aisle, ordinary as bread,
a lyric that sneaks into my chest and makes me remember I can swell.
They come like birds that do not stay:
small, unapologetic, unsettling in their insistence.

I want to be kinder to this unsteady person I wake up as:
to learn the slow art of saying, “I don’t know,”
without it feeling like failure.
To allow confusion to be a room I enter without redecorating,
to sit with my uncertainty like rain on the window —
watching, not fixing.

If feelings were weather, mine would be fog —
dense enough to hide my hands but not so dark I cannot walk.
I will take small steps: one cup of tea, one song, one plain sentence.
I will name one safe place and return to it like a child to a blanket.
I will let my chest be a low, steady clock counting unremarkable minutes.

There is no shame in being a slowly learning heart.
There is no disgrace in trembling before the road.
The world has not trimmed its expectations to my breaking points,
but neither has it removed the quiet corners that hold me.
So I will keep gathering those corners like handfuls of saltlight,
and hold them until they warm my hands enough to move.