Schrödinger’s Interval
Tonight, I lie beneath my beige waffle-weave blanket, which I love because it feels inherited, like something that has already lived a life before it came to me. Candles flicker on the nightstand, their small flames steady and loyal. The window to my right is open. Snow catches the moonlight, and the forest beyond glows in a quiet, restrained, ancient, waiting.
There is a deep ache low in my belly, a soreness that feels older than today. My eyes are heavy. So heavy my lashes press tears into my cheeks without asking permission.
Today was hard.
I want to tell you something about listening to the body — how difficult it is, how easily its language is drowned out by obligation, noise, survival. For years now, I have suspected that many of my physical signals were not malfunctions, but messages. Not punishments, but invitations. A quieter voice trying to speak beneath the clamor of a life lived in endurance.
Today, that voice led me into a clinic.
A routine procedure, they call it. One that countless women undergo. I didn’t know how many until I found myself there, realizing how silently common this passage is.
Cervical biopsy.
My care team was kind — extraordinarily so. And still, fear overtook me. My body began to shake. They noticed immediately and stopped. Asked if I was ready. Told me I had a choice. That I didn’t have to do this.
And it was true. I did have a choice.
But I had done my research. I knew that certainty — real certainty — only comes from looking directly at what we are afraid to see. I knew that healing, at least for me, meant moving forward rather than away. So I nodded. I breathed. And we proceeded.
Three biopsies.
Now, five hours later, the medications have worn thin. The weight of the day arrives all at once — not just the physical aftermath, but the emotional tide that follows any moment where the body is laid bare. Insights surface uninvited. Grief slips in quietly. Old realizations return, rearranged.
I can’t stop crying.
Later, when the tears ease enough for thought to return, my mind drifts to my children. To the fragile, unfinished places between us. To the man I have yet to marry and to my parents, whom I haven’t seen in far too long.
The body has a way of doing this — of widening the circle of what we are asked to feel.
Many women speak of biopsies that remove everything. Of bodies that begin to recover once the cells are gone, once lifestyle shifts are made, once inflammation quiets. I am choosing to believe in that possibility without demanding it. One of my changes is simple, almost mundane: removing dairy, listening at last to the discomfort I’ve ignored for years. Even healing begins with practicality.
And now the morning arrives gently.
I am still beneath the waffle blanket, my body quieter. The room feels like another era — early American window frames, old lines and craftsmanship, a kind of reverence built into the architecture. When I look out at the woods, I think of history books, of forests that once held revolution, survival, waiting.
Today is a waiting day.
A day for stillness. For letting tissue repair itself. For allowing yesterday to settle into memory without interrogation. Results may come tomorrow, or they may not. I am practicing not reaching ahead of myself.
For now, there is only this:
A body that endured.
A spirit that stayed.
A woman learning — slowly, imperfectly — to trust that listening is not weakness.
Healing does not arrive all at once.
It unfurls.
Quietly.
Like snow under moonlight.
Like a forest holding its breath.
Like a body, finally allowed to rest.
Original article: https://medium.com/@anntomology/on-listening-pre-histology-0d513047f6a3?source=rss-dd9d16b8d22f——2