05/08/2026
LITERARY | Physiology of a Betrayed Body
The morning after, I woke up before my alarm. For a few seconds, I was whole. I stared at the ceiling, at the familiar walls, at the sunlight slipping through the curtains as though nothing had changed.
Then I remembered.
It was strange how a single realization could travel through a body, seeping in quietly like water finding a crack until every nerve seemed to know before I did. My mind encountered it first, but my body arrived at the conclusion faster. My stomach dropped. My chest tightened. Something invisible wrapped itself around my ribs and pulled.
I learned about the disloyalty yesterday. The rest of me was still learning it today.
Outside, morning carried on untouched. The sun came through the window with the same indifferent certainty as every other day. People walked to work, cars drifted through traffic, and the world continued with an almost offensive normalcy.
Meanwhile, my heart behaved as though danger had entered its four chambers. I lay there listening to it—fast, restless, uneven. It beats with the urgency of trying to outrun a memory. I pressed a hand against my chest, hoping I could quiet it, but betrayal had already introduced my body to a language it could not unlearn.
My lungs forgot what safety felt like. Every inhale stopped somewhere beneath my collarbones, never reaching the bottom of my lungs. I found myself sighing without relief, inhaling without feeling full. My ribs stayed guarded, as if expanding too much might invite another wound.
Then hunger disappeared. Meals cooled untouched. Coffee turned bitter long before I remembered to drink it. I swallowed food that felt too heavy for a stomach already carrying what it could not digest. It seemed that trust and appetite had left through the same door.
Sleep, once the gentlest part of my day, became another place where betrayal followed me. I woke to every vibration of my phone, every creak in the hallway, every silence that lasted a little too long. And before I knew it, morning had already arrived long before rest ever did.
Even my muscles refused to forget. My shoulders stayed lifted as if bracing for another impact. My jaw ached from explanations and justifications I never had. My fists clenched with desperation, as if loosening them meant risking another loss.
Then my skin learned fear. A hand reaching toward mine could feel like comfort one moment and danger the next. Familiar embraces carried unfamiliar hesitation. I had forgotten that skin can still flinch long after the hurt has ended.
My brain began mistaking uncertainty for danger. A certain perfume, a familiar laugh across the room, a name glowing on a screen—each one sent my thoughts spiraling before reason could intervene. By then, my nervous system had already declared a state of emergency.
That was only one of the many things your betrayal stole from me: the ability to encounter ordinary things ordinarily.
The cruelest part was that the damage belonged to the past, yet every reflex insisted it was happening again. Days became weeks. Weeks became months. The danger was long gone, but every inch of my flesh disagreed. And I hated that someone else's choices had taken up residence beneath my skin.
People often speak about heartbreak as though it lives exclusively in the heart. Mine never stayed there. It settled wherever my body once believed it was safe: into lungs that forgot how to breathe deeply, into a stomach that could no longer distinguish hunger from grief, into shoulders that carried invisible weight, into hands that mistook letting go for losing, into skin that learned to flinch before it healed, and into a mind that rehearsed catastrophes long after the danger had passed.
Perhaps that is what betrayal truly is—not the discovery of another person’s disloyalty, but the realization that your body has begun preparing for disasters that never came. It does not simply wound a person; it recruits the body into remembering what the mind is desperate to forget.
What was hardest to understand was that while you were the one who broke my trust, I was the one left carrying the symptoms. Still, my heart refused to stop beating. My lungs kept filling. My stomach remembered hunger. My muscles loosened, little by little. My skin learned that not every touch was a warning.
My body continued showing up for me every day, carrying what it never asked for and enduring what it never deserved.
And somehow, through all of it, it remained loyal.
In a way you were not.
Written by Mickaella Maris Vargas
Board by Shaquel Agumbay
