Different Faces, Same Wound
The Wound That Walks With You
There are moments when you realise the past isn’t something you outgrew
It isn’t something you walked away from.
It is there inside you, hiding quietly in your body, in your mind, colouring choices before you notice.
You change the structure and shape of your life.
You shed dead layers of yourself.
You promise not to return to the cage you outgrew.
And then it appears again,
a new scene,
a new beginning,
the same faint stain.
For years I called it bad luck.
Later, a pattern.
Eventually, something closer to what it was, a pulling.
I didn’t understand then how the body drifts backwards toward the paths it once endured.
How even painful places can feel familiar.
A child unnoticed learns to stand where their presence doesn’t squeak.
A heart raised in turmoil learns to mistake the rumble for closeness.
We don’t repeat the pain to suffer.
We repeat it because something in us is resolved:
a younger us waiting to finish a story that paused mid-sentence.
The shift wasn’t a great awakening.
Just a whispered honesty.
I stopped asking why it kept happening
and began noticing what it uncovered.
Different names.
Same scab being picked.
An itch tracing its way back to the first wound.
Seeing it didn’t remove anything.
But the irritation dulled.
Enough to weaken the tug.
Enough to recognise that what felt like destiny was memory.
