My body has forgotten its own language. The hypothalamus—that ancient thermostat—misfires like a house with faulty wiring, sending false alarms of danger and heat. Under my skin, magma rises without warning. I think of those nature documentaries: thermal imaging of Yellowstone, the ground that ripples with hidden fire, how the earth's crust can split from forces below.

Each flash begins like a match strike at the base of my spine, climbing upward until my skin becomes a map of drought-cracked riverbeds, particles separating in the heat. I am both desert and flood—patches of my shirt darkening like storm clouds, my hairline beading with unwanted rain. This confusion of signals reminds me of other times my brain betrayed me: the panic attacks of my twenties, when danger seemed to lurk in every crowded room, my body then too quick to read threat in fluorescent lights and friendly faces.

Now, as then, I can't trust my own internal weather. My hippocampus, that seahorse-shaped keeper of memory and temperature regulation, swims in a soup of shifting hormones. It sends desperate messages: Danger! Heat! Cool down! But there is no predator, no fire—just this betrayal of biology, this crossing of neural wires.

In the midnight kitchen, I press ice cubes to my wrists, watch them melt against pulse points. Water rolls down my arms like the sweat of fever dreams. My body moves through its own seasons, independent of the world outside my window. Winter nights become tropical summers under my skin, and I remember how it felt to lose trust in my mind before—that same disconnect between reality and response, the same feeling of living in a house where the thermometer has gone mad.

I stand before the open freezer, letting artificial winter wash over my face, and think about how many times in a life we must relearn the geography of ourselves. How the map keeps changing: anxiety's borders expanding and contracting, hormones redrawing the lines of temperature and time, until we barely recognize the country we've lived in all along.