The Echo of Impulse
At any given moment, the brain is a battlefield of electricity—14 billion neurons colliding, sparking, surging at 450 miles per hour. A quiet war waged beneath the surface of skin and bone, sending orders we never consciously sign off on. The flutter of a pulse when a name lingers too long in the air. The chill down the spine when something forgotten brushes against the edge of memory. The bloom of goosebumps at the whisper of a touch, a look, a thought too dangerous to say aloud.
The body follows its instincts without apology. It reacts before we do. Before reason can step in, before logic can pull the emergency brake. A shiver of anticipation. A stomach dropping like a stone in water. Adrenaline pulsing, pushing, pulling. We tell ourselves we are creatures of discipline, of control. But aren’t we, in the end, just bodies responding to invisible forces, hearts set on fire by things we wish we could ignore?
Sometimes, we surrender. Sometimes, we don’t even realize we’ve lost the fight until we’re standing in the wreckage, trying to piece together where the line blurred between decision and inevitability. Between want and need. Between choice and impulse. We step toward things that feel like gravity, like destiny, like something written long before we arrived. And in the moment, it’s easy to believe that no other outcome was ever possible.
But the weight of impulse doesn’t consider consequence. It doesn’t care for morning-after thoughts or hearts held together by fragile seams. It is the storm that does not apologize for the mess it leaves behind. The wildfire that doesn’t think about what it burns. And in its aftermath, we are left standing in the quiet, in the stillness, realizing that control isn’t in the moment before the fall—it’s in what comes after.
The body is a slave to its impulses, but the soul—oh, the soul is something else entirely. The soul is what remains when the heat dies down. It is the hands that clean up the glass from a shattered moment. It is the breath that slows when regret threatens to suffocate. It is the thing that chooses, despite everything, to try again. To stand tall. To stretch toward the sun even after being stripped bare by the winter of bad decisions. To believe that maybe, just maybe, it’s possible to bloom again.
And then again…