You tell me it is all in my head.

As though my head were a small room where false alarms
ring for sport,
like I have no better way to spend my time and life.

You hold films up to the light,
of bones and blood,
nothing cracked or out of place,
or a catastrophe waiting in the wings
that has earned a name in your stack of books.

My blood you have drawn
has traveled through your machines
and has come back with its verdict: normal.
Within range.
Unremarkable.

You speak these words calmly to me
but they hit heavy in my heart.

If it is all in my head,
then why does my chest feel like a house
where all the doors have been slammed shut,
all my muscles are bracing for what is to come?

There is another realm you do not scan,
in a region that does not show up on x-rays
or MRIs.
Places where grief lodges and has no easy fixes.

I am more than the data points lined up
so neatly on your screen.
More than the neat charts that
refuse to tell you what is hidden.

I am a body that remembers
what my mouth cannot always say.

The past does not stay politely behind me.
It seeps into my muscles,
tangles in my gut,
and rumbles in my mind.

My body is tired of being a battlefield
where invisible wars are waged.
It is tired of the tugging,
your perceived reality
against the one my body is telling me.

You have not paused to ask me why I come here.

I come here because I am afraid.
Afraid that what haunts me will be
formed into something permanent.
Afraid that, if no one names it,
it will consume me.

I come because somewhere
beneath the white coat
and the records stacked on your desk
and on the computer screen,
I hope there is a human being
who remembers what it is to ache
without an explanation to substantiate it.

You stand at the edge of a territory
you were possibly not trained to enter,
compassion and empathy.

The slow, unhurried listening that asks not
“What is wrong with you?” but
“What has happened to you?”

Allow me time to speak.

I will tell you about the nights
when sleep refuses to come.
The anxiety that stains
the bright sunny mornings.

You might discover that the illness has no Latin name,
no billing code,
no ready prognosis.

You might learn
that healing is sometimes the art
of witnessing.

Sit with me.
Listen, not for cross-referencing pathology,
but for story.

And you may find
that what you called imaginary
is a wound that does not show itself to the eye,
only to the heart willing to see.

Michele Luckenbaugh is a patient advocate.