A Tuesday That Didn't End

06:40

Awake before the alarm, which is not the same as rested. The ceiling has the same crack it had yesterday. I know its shape better than some faces.

07:15

Made tea. Forgot it. Found it at nine, cold, with a skin on top. This happens often enough that I’ve stopped counting it as a failure and started counting it as weather.

09:30

Fourteen unread messages. None of them unkind. That is almost worse: there is no one to be angry at, only a small pile of ordinary kindness I can’t lift.

11:02

Someone asked how I was. I said fine. The word is a door you close gently so nobody hears it shut.

13:20

Lunch was crackers, standing at the counter, straight from the packet. It counts. Today, everything counts.

15:45

The afternoon has no edges. Fog isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t thunder. It just removes the distance — you can see the next step and nothing past it, and after a while you stop believing in past it.

17:30

Walked to the shop and back. Eleven minutes. Noticed: a cat on a wall; wet leaves stuck flat to the pavement like stamps; a child explaining something very seriously to a dog. Wrote them down so they would still exist later.

20:10

Showered. Forty minutes of negotiating, four minutes of doing. The ratio is most of the illness, really.

23:55

Tuesday is supposed to end at midnight. It doesn’t, quite. It thins out. It becomes a long blue hallway where the hours don’t have numbers.

02:17

Still here. Not in a frightening way — just here, the way a stone is still in a river. The water keeps going around it.

06:40

Wednesday, apparently. The crack in the ceiling, same as before. But I wrote down the cat, and the leaves, and the child. They are still true. That’s something to carry down the hill.