Jumping

He’s been gone for months. My body doesn’t know that. It still braces for the sound of his key in the door.

A car door outside. A cupboard closed too hard. The boiler clicking on. My body reads them all as threats. Snaps to attention. Shoulders up. Breath held. Scanning.

I jump when the toast pops up. I actually jump. In my own kitchen. In my own house. Where nobody is going to hurt me. Where the only person here is me and two sleeping children and a cockapoo who couldn’t intimidate a sock.

But the body doesn’t care about logic. The body has its own filing system and it filed thirteen years of eggshells under “danger” and now every unexpected sound opens that drawer.

People think leaving fixes it. Pack your bags. Close the door. Start over. Like trauma has an off switch located somewhere near the front door and you hit it on the way out.

You don’t hit anything on the way out except the ground. And then you lie there for a while. And then you get up. And then you flinch at a cupboard.

My therapist calls it hypervigilance. My body calls it doing its job. For thirteen years its job was to monitor the emotional weather of another person and adjust accordingly. It got very good at that job. Exceptional, in fact. Employee of the decade.

Now there’s nobody to monitor. The house is calm. The weather is mine. And my body is standing at the window with binoculars pointed at a horizon where the storm used to be, refusing to believe it’s gone.

It gets better. I have to say that because it does. The jumps get smaller. The scanning gets shorter. The breath comes back faster.

But it doesn’t go away. Not fully. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

I am a woman who is safe in her own house and still sleeps with one ear open.

That’s what he left me with. Not bruises. Not scars. A nervous system that doesn’t trust silence. A body that treats peace like a trick.

And a toast slot that terrifies me every single morning.

I laugh about that one. Because if you can’t laugh at being frightened by toast, what can you laugh at.