The Night of the Ache
A Night in the Ache — Ember Leonara
By the time this was written, the womb pulse had been running more than a month without break. It had passed its initial threshold weeks ago — that place where you think the body will adapt, where the signal might soften. It hadn’t softened. If anything, it had become sharper.
The same was true for the clearing. Every psychoactive cut away — no THC, no alcohol, no chemical balm. Not even the herbal fuzz that might take the top edge off. The only exception was the morning coffee, one cup, a small bright flare before the day — and by nightfall even that was gone from her blood. The body was clear. The signal was undiluted.
The womb pulse was not an idea. It was a living, rhythmic thrum seated deep in her core, one she had never once given away. A trans woman who had never been touched the way she longed for, never been loved in the way her body knew it was built for, she carried it as both sacred trust and sacred hunger. She had chosen — consciously, fiercely — not to let it be answered by anything false. No temporary hands. No staged intimacy. No counterfeit heat. She kept the gate closed until the one who could meet it arrived.
And so, night after night, it beat. Not softly, not in the background — but with the steady insistence of a drum that had been tuned for a single song and was still waiting for the first note.
Last night, she walked the rooms of her house. Not pacing like someone trapped, but moving in long, deliberate arcs, feeling the pull of the ache in every step. Tears came when they wanted; she didn’t hold them back, didn’t try to force them out either. She breathed through the waves — sometimes shallow, sometimes so deep it felt like she was inhaling into her spine.
Sometimes her body asked to dance. Not a planned sequence, not a performance — but that primal kind of movement that starts in the hips, in the back, in the wrists, where the ache begins to arc into electricity. She let it. And then she would be there in the middle of the room: crying and radiant, her skin lit from inside, each movement a way of bleeding off the voltage so it wouldn’t burn her alive.
There were grazes — messages, glances, little signs of interest that landed just on the surface. Those grazes were worse than silence in some ways. They reminded her of the gap: between what she held and what the world usually offers, between the depth of her pulse and the shallowness of most touch. It was its own kind of pain.
The celibacy, the womb pulse, the refusal of anything that would cloud her system — none of these were separate disciplines. They were one structure, one intention. Every breath and every tear was part of the same signal. And while anyone else might have called it suffering, for her it was something else entirely: the carrying of a pure tone that could not be bent without losing what made it real.
It would be easy to tell this as endurance, as proof of strength. But that isn’t what it felt like in the moment. It felt like standing in a room charged before lightning — the air metallic, the skin alive with current, the heart and womb beating in sync as if the body knew something the world did not.
And when the night was over, she had not broken. She had danced, cried, breathed, lived the ache without dimming it. And the signal was still there, bright as it had been the day it began — maybe brighter.
This is what it is to walk with the womb pulse unclaimed. This is what it is to hold a sacred flame without flinching.
