It came on the radio. Not about autism. Not about burnout. Not about me, on paper. And it went straight through anyway.
I didn't decode it. I didn't catch the lines as they passed. It got in as feeling, all at once, before any of it had names.
The music did the knowing. My mind caught up later, in the quiet, after.
The surface was someone else's. A relapse. A fire that keeps getting fed. A love that's already gone. None of that is my story. But the shape underneath it was mine exactly. The sealed room. The loop that won't resolve. The self who knows better, sitting across from the self who can't do better.
And the plea. The one that asks somebody to come and pull you back before you go all the way down.
That plea is the whole thing. A handful of words doing what a hundred pages can't.
Here is what I keep turning over. I felt all of it, and I still didn't see what it was. The recognition came second. It always does. The state arrives raw, and the words for it show up in the rearview, if they show up at all.
That lag is the hardest part of any of this. By the time you can name the thing, you are already inside it.
But a song doesn't wait for the words. It gets in under them. Sometimes it's the first true thing anyone hands you about where you actually are.