Have you ever held yourself inside of a moth’s nest?

Not that I should really know what a moth’s nest looks like, or if there even is such a thing, but let’s just say that there was. 

Sticky, it would be to me. Like cotton-candy without the pastels and crystalline glimmer from the saliva-soakened sugars. 

It would be a dull grey. You know, so dull that it blends in with everything else around it. It starts off with a thin un-assuming, seemingly non-invasive film. And it builds. 

And it builds until it forms a thick callus-like structure. That’s right, callus. Like a soar guitar finger, or better yet, callous, as in an insensitive; indifferent; unsympathetic gesture. And it builds in the dark, right before your eyes, and then one day you stop and you look over… and you say…. “hhhhhey.. wait a minute.. where’d the heck that thing come from?”

And you start waving your arms in a loose frenzy, sweating: “Oh god I’m stuck in this thing; I can’t breathe. How’d I get myself into this?” And with every thrust, the callus gets bigger and thicker around you. 

And here, deep within the recesses of your self-imposed cave, you begin to breathe, slow the mind, reflect deep within. How to find the answers. You sit cross-legged on the floor. You wait until the wind peeps through just a little. 

Callus. Oh yes. Don’t they build up as defence-mechanisms around things that need to heal? 

And the longer I sit, the more that callus starts to soften. As the wound within heals, the protective outer-layer can relinquish. 

And as the wound within heals, it ripples outward, breaking through like 100-year old gyp rock awaiting just the right hardened fingertips to come and wipe it all away. 

So what’s underneath all that old pain(t)?

It’s me. And I can breathe again. 
Breaking-free.