I know the recliner. I know the specific angle people find after months of experimenting. I know that the house is quiet now, and that quiet is both a relief and the loudest part of the day.
Nobody talks much about the nights. Appointments happen during daylight, when we describe symptoms in reasonable voices. The nights belong to you alone, and they are usually where the hardest thinking happens.
So I wanted there to be something here for two in the morning. Not advice. Just company.
If it helps at all: what you are doing right now — adjusting, waiting, breathing through it, watching the light change on the ceiling — is not failure. It is a person taking care of themselves in the only way available at this hour. Tomorrow you may not remember it as anything at all. I would remember it as endurance.
There is nothing you need to figure out before morning.
The night has a way of making everything feel permanent. It isn’t. Bodies feel different in daylight, not because anything was solved, but because the nervous system finds daylight easier to trust.
Stay warm. Let the chair hold you. You are not the only person awake and hurting right now, and I have thought about you more than you would guess.
Until morning. — Tammie
