What crawls beneath these ribs
that should not be?
A quiet ache,
like a rising sea.

Pain comes in waves—
soft, yet slow—
enough to halt
where feet would go.

The Turning Inward

Here, the poem shifts again.

The landscape disappears.

The stillness remains—but it changes form.

What once existed outside—fields, stones, quiet spaces—
now moves inward.

Into the body.
Into something felt, rather than seen.

This transition is consistent with the earlier parts:
from reflection in Part 1: Where Poems Return,
to belonging in Part 2: Among Quiet Stones,
to witnessing in Part 3: The Freesias as Witness,
and now—
to confrontation.

“What crawls beneath these ribs…”

The question is no longer about writing.

It is about origin.

Where does it come from—
this need to write,
this pull toward expression,
this persistence of feeling?

The word “crawls” is deliberate.

It suggests something uneasy.
Something slow, invasive, and difficult to ignore.

Not a sudden emotion—
but one that lingers.

Something that stays.

Every writer’s muse differs:

A lover.
A parent.
A sibling.
A friend.
A stranger.
A place.
A memory.
An experience.

Anything. Anyone. Anywhere.

My writing has always revolved around my life—
what I feel,
what I think,
what I see,
what I hear.

When I wrote this line, I realized how often pain has propelled me into writing some of the most poignant pieces I have ever created.

A childhood friend who left.
A best friend who betrayed.
An ex-boyfriend who cheated.
Someone important I lost.

It is not always about them.

It is about what they did—
and how it made me feel.

How I processed those feelings,
and turned them into art.

“That should not be?”

There is resistance here.

A quiet confrontation with something unwanted.

An emotion that feels misplaced,
uninvited,
perhaps even undeserved.

It introduces conflict—
not between people,
but within the self.

I have often been seen as cheerful, loud, and full of energy.

When I am happy, I am deeply happy.
And when I am sad, I am equally deep in that sadness.

My emotions tend to move toward extremes.

And so, this kind of pain—
the quiet, lingering kind—
felt like something that should not exist within me.

The misplaced ache.
The unwanted heaviness.

They should not remain—
not in my body,
not in the scars I carry,
not in the hollow of my ribs.

I did not want my emotions to poison my poetry.

A Quiet Ache, Like a Rising Sea

The ache is not loud.

It does not demand attention.
It does not announce itself.

Instead, it builds—
gradually,
almost imperceptibly.

Like the sea,
it rises whether we acknowledge it or not.

It moves with its own rhythm.

It does not rush.
It does not disappear.

There is something powerful in this comparison.

The sea is vast.
Endless.
Uncontainable.

To liken emotion to the sea is to admit
that it cannot simply be controlled or dismissed.

It can only be felt.

In my earlier poems, I often leaned toward escape—
a desire to leave my hometown,
to move away from everything familiar.

But over time, I began to understand:
I was not leaving a place.

I was running from the ghosts that lived within me.

The same ghosts that lingered in my writing—
traces of memory woven into every line,
every metaphor,
every quiet confession.

And now, I can see them more clearly.

They were always there.

Where Writing Begins

This moment in the poem reveals something essential.

Writing does not always begin with clarity.

Sometimes, it begins with discomfort.

With a question that has no immediate answer.
With a feeling that refuses to settle.
With something beneath the surface
that insists on being acknowledged.

Some emotions do not arrive all at once.

They rise slowly—
quiet, persistent,
impossible to ignore.

And sometimes, before we understand them—
before we can even name them—

they begin to write themselves through us.

The Movement of Pain

Pain, in this section, is not static.

It moves.

But not forcefully—
something quieter, more gradual.

It comes in waves.

There is rhythm in it.
There is repetition.
There is return.

This line did not come from a single moment of pain,
but from the recognition that pain rarely arrives all at once.

It comes back—
again and again.

When writing this, I thought about how pain has pulled me into depths that felt like drowning—

and at times, left me floating, suspended between heaviness and breath.

There were moments I felt consumed by it—
as if I had become nothing more than a vessel for the emotion itself.

“Soft, Yet Slow”: The Nature of Lingering Pain

The phrase “soft, yet slow” complicates the idea of pain.

Pain is often imagined as something sharp and immediate.

But here, it is quiet.

“Soft” suggests that it does not overwhelm all at once.

But “slow” reveals something more difficult.

Because what is slow—
lingers.

And what lingers—
stays.

This kind of pain is not easier.

It is simply quieter.

There was a time I carried this kind of pain for years—
through stormy nights,
through ordinary days.

Because it was not overwhelming,
I convinced myself it was not significant.

I downplayed its weight.
I overestimated my ability to cope.

But healing, I later realized,
has always been slow.

The Pause: “Enough to Halt”

This is where the effect of the wave becomes visible.

“Enough to halt” introduces interruption.

Movement is no longer continuous.

Something has shifted.

Pain, even when quiet, carries weight.

It does not need to be overwhelming to be powerful.

It only needs to be enough—

enough to slow you down,
enough to make you stop,
enough to interrupt where you thought you were going.

There were moments when pain stopped me from doing what I needed to do.

Deadlines left unmet.
Words left unwritten.

I tried to create something light—
but memory would return,
and the weight would settle again.

The pain delayed my healing
because I kept holding on—

not realizing I was, in some ways,
holding myself back.

“Where Feet Would Go”: Interrupted Direction

The final line carries quiet weight.

“Where feet would go” suggests intention.
A path.
A direction already in motion.

But that movement is interrupted.

Not erased—
but paused.

There is something deeply human in this:
the awareness that we were going somewhere,
only to be stopped by something we could not control.

For me, this line became less about physical movement
and more about direction in life—

plans, dreams, and the quiet momentum of becoming.

There were moments when pain distanced me from those dreams.

Times when I felt close to finishing something—
only to be pulled back by what I carried inside.

Too heavy to write through.
Too heavy to speak aloud.

And this poem became a way of saying:
perhaps it is time
to finally let it go.

The Quiet Interruption

This part of the poem does not dramatize pain.

It does not exaggerate it.

Instead, it presents it as something steady—
something that returns,
something that lingers,
something that quietly alters movement.

Pain does not always break us in obvious ways.

Sometimes, it simply asks us to stop.

And in that pause,
something begins to shift.

Finally—

not all interruptions are loud.

Some arrive gently,
wave after wave,

until we realize

we are no longer moving
the way we once did.