PSYRAW FLUX

I am twenty-nine. People still card me at the door.

Lately I cry and I don’t always know why. It comes the way London weather comes, suddenly there, then suddenly not. I’ve started calling it terrified, because sad isn’t quite right, and lost is too simple, and terrified has the right shape in my mouth. Something opening. Something not yet named.

Saturn Return, someone told me. The planet comes back to where it started. You have to account for yourself.

I didn’t know I’d been running a tab.

There are things I remember in the wrong order.

Philadelphia was supposed to be our first trip together. It became the last.

We walked through streets I can’t picture now. At some point he asked me why I loved him. It was a real question. He wanted a real answer.

I said I didn’t know.

I meant it. I thought I was being honest.

Then there was the one who took me to Shanghai. A birthday surprise, one month in. A trip I had always wanted, but suddenly I was there with him, and I couldn’t tell anymore if I’d wanted the city or just the idea of not being alone in it. Kissing him in the bed. I think I mistook relief for love. Or maybe I mistook loneliness for need. The line between them is thinner than it looks from the outside.

By the time I understood the difference, it was already over.

Then there was the younger one. Six years younger. My longest relationship so far, which should mean something, but I’m not sure what.

He got excited about small things: a song he just discovered, the way light hit the wall. I loved watching him move through the world like that, untangled. Like there was no hum of should, should, should following him around.

He made me feel alive in a way that scared me.

I was terrified of him for exactly that reason.

I loved him for exactly that reason.

And then I flinched, somewhere he needed me not to. He tried, maybe. Or maybe he didn’t. Either way, at some point he just couldn’t anymore.

The first one asked me why, and I couldn’t answer. The second one gave me relief, and I still felt alone. The third one made me feel alive, and I was terrified of it.

None of them stayed.

I’m not sure any of them saw me — the version that shows up uninvited, that runs marathons toward unclear finish lines.

Maybe that’s what I’ve been circling all along. Not a person. Not even a feeling. Just the simple, terrifying thing of being fully seen and not flinched at.

I know I want that. I am certain of it the way I am certain of very little else at twenty-nine.

And I am still terrified.

Terrified that it doesn’t exist. Terrified that it does, and I’ll miss it. Terrified that someone will finally see all of me and I won’t know how to stay still long enough to let them.

My college boyfriend once asked me why I majored in psychology.

You want to read minds for a living?

No. I wanted to understand my own.

We didn’t last either.

From the outside, my path looks clean. Intentional, even. Each step leading to the next. I know how it reads. I’ve watched people read it. But an impressive line doesn’t always lead somewhere. Sometimes it’s just — a line.

My peers are building things with clear names. Marriages. Families. Careers with business cards. I watch from a distance that has nothing to do with miles.

I am happy for them. I think I am happy for them.

I am also twenty-nine and still trying to figure out what I’m building, or if building is even the right verb for what I’m doing.

The crying has no schedule. The terror, less so. They arrive the way certain thoughts do — uninvited, undeniable, gone before I can name them.

Twenty-nine feels less like an age and more like a weather system I’m learning to move through.