🐚 The wounds you bury don’t stay buried.

View from KittyAnn’s Window

There’s no “employees only” sign on the bathroom door, so I push it open. And it looks exactly the same as I remember it. 

Literally nothing here has changed. 

The force of it, so strikingly identical, ports me back in time. Heat undulates against my face like the blast from an open oven. Then a current shoots up my midline, sparking in my chest: my body’s signal to self-protect. 

Something inside me just cracked open.

I inhale deeply, instinctively, to quell it, because I need to savor this moment. Even in its displeasure. Because this will be the last time I stand here.

It’s a knowing that arrives fully formed.

And as I trust the knowing, I also question it. Nothing would stop me from visiting later, if I wanted to. I don’t foresee a disaster destroying the building, nor my own untimely death or disability that would prevent it. The knowing isn’t a prediction – it’s a remorseful acceptance. This has simply been a pilgrimage to the last vestige of a place I knew and loved and lost, to feel how it still exists and also doesn’t.

I sense a circuit completing – and know that I’m standing, right now, on the edge between what I remember and what’s in front of me. One last chance, mere moments now, to embody this place through the skin of the woman I was.

But as my system catches up with reality, making sense of what was then and what is now, I feel that possibility slipping away. 

I consider using the toilet or washing my hands. Maybe if I feel the porcelain under my legs, coax the faucets, cradle that cold water, I can close my eyes and feel it, like it was. One last time.

But I don’t. Because even though this place looks the same, its energy has changed. 

And, perhaps more relevantly, so has mine. Those memories live in the skin and the mind of who I was. No matter how badly I want to, I cannot manufacture a replication of that felt sense I am so desperately craving, because I am not the same person I used to be.

I realize this fully and all at once, and a wave of grief crashes through me. I choke back a sound, and a few tears wet my cheeks. Then it passes – a quick, hard squall – and I close the bathroom door.

This part is done. But, if I’m being honest with myself, I know this was simply a closing ritual to work my soul had already completed.

***

Spoiler alert: KittyAnn’s trip to Stowe Harbor is all about closure she didn’t know she needed. 

You would have figured that out eventually, just like she did. But I’m telling you now because the need for closure has a way of sneaking up on us. KittyAnn carried this charge for twenty years before she looked it straight in the eye.

Why? 

For one, she needed space. KittyAnn’s a forty-something mom of three, a suburban entrepreneur daily-drowning in soccer runs, syrup spills, and musty piles of wet pool towels her kids have been dumping in the mudroom all summer. Her life moves fast: fast fashion, fast food, fast scroll. Constant contact. Constant on.

No wonder it’s hard for her to compose a thought, let alone hear herself thinking. KittyAnn had to physically escape her life just to listen to what her system was saying.

Second – she wasn’t ready before now. Grief is layered and nuanced, and it shows up on its own timeline. This thing that happened back then? She was sure she was over it. It happened such a long time ago.

But her body never got to grieve it. She was too young to know she needed to. Then too tired. Too busy. More life happened. And the grief got buried under grad school and a nicely landscaped lawn and the career freedom she thought would make her actually free. 

But buried grief doesn’t compost – it rots. Festers. And eventually, when your body is done holding that wreckage rent-free, it rises and demands to be dealt with.

Different pieces will ask to leave in different seasons of your life. When they knock, you’ve gotta turn the knob and let ‘em out.

Releasing – however you choose to do it – is the prerequisite to closure. It’s the last step before you can close the loop, complete the circuit. Even if it’s been a long time, even if your brain is “over it” – your body needs a symbolic, ceremonial act that makes it real. Not just imagined. Tangible.

KittyAnn’s trip to Stowe Harbor is stock-full of these little rituals. Some she does because she thinks she’s supposed to – visiting a grave, reconnecting with a long-lost friend. But those? Hollow. Pretty useless, actually. 

The ones that work? Tossing week-old mozzarella sticks into the harbor, and this: standing in a place that used to hold her, feeling how the place hasn’t changed but she has.

That wasn’t just a bathroom. It was a portal between past and present, letting her body catch up to what her brain already knew. The magic of that place had been gone for a while, but she had to stand there to feel that it was true.

The wounds you bury don’t stay buried. They swell and ferment in the dark until they’re too bloated to stay underground. They feel like a blister – all pressure and stagnation – and they keep pushing until you find what’s blocking you and move it out of the way. 

And that’s your sacred charge: to let it out. Let it breathe, see the light. Feel it. Let it move.

Whether you do it around a bonfire, or by screaming so hard it hurts, or letting the harbor reclaim your leftovers, or just…standing in a bathroom – let it move.

You deserve to have that space back.

You need it for what comes next.

With all my wild heart,

Sadie xo

P.S. If something I said resonated — and you’re craving a space to unpack your own story — get in touch with me. I’d be honored to hold that space for you.