There's a language the body speaks that has no words.
I've been learning it involuntarily, the way you learn the sound of a door that means something different than other doors. The way you learn to hear weather before it arrives.
My nervous system has become a cartographer of threats. It maps rooms I haven't entered yet. It draws borders around sounds, categorizing: safe, unsafe, unknown. I didn't commission this work. It happened while I was busy being in love.
The ancients believed the heart was the seat of thought. They were wrong about the organ but right about the location — something lives in the chest that knows things the mind refuses. It beats out warnings in a rhythm too slow to hear, too fast to ignore.
I've started listening to it. I wish I'd started sooner.
Someone once told me that birds inherit migration routes. Not through teaching — through blood. A warbler hatched in captivity still knows which direction is south. The body carries maps it never made.
I think about this when I flinch at nothing. When my shoulders rise toward my ears without permission. When I wake already calculating escape routes from a dream I can't remember. Something got written into me. Some map I never asked for, pointing toward a south that doesn't exist.
Love is supposed to be the safe country. The place where the body stands down, unlearns its vigilance, softens. I know this. I've read about it. Somewhere there are people whose nervous systems learned gentleness from proximity, whose bodies were taught by touch that the world could be trusted.
Mine learned something else.
The body doesn't distinguish between a tiger and a memory of a tiger. This is what makes us survivors. This is what makes us haunted. The same mechanism that kept us alive on the savannah keeps us flinching in living rooms, jumping at sounds that mean nothing, holding our breath against dangers that have already passed.
I've become a museum of small survivals. Each exhibit unlabeled, the placard lost, just the artifact remaining: here is the flinch. Here is the held breath. Here is the way sleep became a calculated risk.
They say the body keeps the score. But it's more than that. The body keeps the whole game — every play, every injury, every ref who looked the other way. It replays the tape at night. It studies the film. It prepares for a rematch that will never come.
I'm learning to negotiate with this body, this animal self that believes danger is still present tense. That was then, I tell it. We're safe now. But the body doesn't speak that language. It only knows what it knows. And what it knows, it learned from you.
Unlearning will take longer than learning. This is the cruelest math. Years to build trust, seconds to shatter it, decades to rebuild on the shattered ground.
But I'm starting. Breath by breath. Teaching my body a new language, one word at a time.
Safe. Safe. Safe.
It doesn't believe me yet. But I keep saying it.