The Ache That Has No Name

Sometimes,
the pain I carry in my heart unspoken
crawls silently into my body and bones.
It doesn’t cry. It doesn’t scream.
It just aches.

I’ve learned that
when I can’t speak my sorrow,
my body speaks it for me.

My mother taught me that.
Not in words, but in the way she broke.

I remember the day she almost drowned in the big pond of my grandparents' house,
Not just her, my uncle, my aunt —
all of them slip into the water,
the weight of panic pulling them under.

She came out alive. They all.
Calm. Composed.
As if nothing had happened.
But coming back home,
her body crumbled.
Pressure dancing up and down,
limbs weak, soul shaken.
She hadn’t cried.
But her body had.

We realised she is in shock, fear,

and her body let me know that.

It happened again before,
when her mother, my grandmother, died.
She returned from the funeral
quiet, almost distant.
But for months,
she was not well. She was unstable.
Grief had tied itself around her organs
and refused to let go.

And I…
I probably slowly became her shadow.

I have PCOS.
But long before the diagnosis,
my teenage body had begun to listen
to my silent sadness.

We moved to a new place.
No friends. No familiar laughter.
I used to sit alone in my balcony in the afternoon.

The house was full of people, of chaos, of noise.
And every time I swallowed pain,
it settled into my chest
like tiny needles threading grief into muscle.

Period cramps used to grow more when I used to be sad,

it made me feel like the cramps are in my hands and legs as well.

Then, after years, love happened.
And left.
Like they always do.

Very close people turned their back.

I smiled through the goodbye.
Laughed even.
But after some nights, I was lying on my bed at my dorm,
fever struck badly like a storm.
My mother caught an emergency flight,

flew to me,
because she somehow understood,
this wasn’t just the flu.
This was heartbreak
breaking more than just a heart.

There were other nights ….
when a friend’s cold silence
tied my stomach in knots.
When a single argument
left me bedridden for days.
When my hands froze,
my skin drenched in sweat,
and the world tilted
because my pressure had crashed
like my spirit.

Once, I read a facebook post …
“If heartbreak had a colour,
the world would bleed blue.
And if pain had sound?
We’d all be deaf.”

But pain doesn’t wear color.
Sorrow doesn’t sing.

So people walk away
never knowing
what their absence, their given injury on my heart did to my body
how their silence echoed in my bones.
How the bruise they left was not just in my heart and my mind,
but in every joint of me.

Sometimes,I wish, I wish they knew.
How their words , thei actions or lack of them
broke me in ways no doctor could fix.

But they don’t know.
And maybe they never will.

If they knew,

would they still have walked away?

Would they still have hurt this soul this way?