AlchemyThe Bone Shaker

I opened my eyes and started to scream. I didn’t even know what I was screaming for at first. Was it the pain The shock The realisation of what had just happened Or the fear of what would come next. This wasn’t my car. Strange that this was my first thought. Not that my legs were crushed Not that I was wrapped around a tree in the middle of the night Alone No headlights No voices Just me And the sound of my own body trying to make sense of the impact. I could have been dead. I could have been about to die. But my first thought was how angry the owner of the car would be. Thirty years later I found an old journal describing this exact incident Months before it happened. A picture of a car Crashed into a tree Not as a warning But as something I wanted to feel. Life feels heavy at eighteen. You finish school Your friends scatter You start working or studying You try to be independent You try to stand up And the whole world feels too big Too loud Too much. You don’t know how to name what’s happening inside you. You don’t have any skills You don’t what tools are You can't describe the ache in your chest. You just want the pressure to stop. You want a loophole A way out An end. Something permanent. Most of us spend our whole lives circling that same pattern Either not knowing how to face what we feel Or searching for something That might tell us how to finally let it rest. But we feel it To the bone All the way down Until one day the shaking stops And we realise we are no longer the version of ourselves who crawled into that wreckage. This is alchemy The bone shaker The moment the old self cracks So a new one can take its first breath.