Because if I stop, I’ll break.
And if I break tonight, I don’t think I’ll come back from it.
The sunlight is brutal when it forces its way through the blinds.
I’m not in bed. I don’t even remember getting home.
I wake up on the floor, half on the rug, half on cold wood, with a blanket I must’ve pulled down from the couch sometime before the world went black. My mouth tastes like regret. My head pounds with every heartbeat. My phone’s face-down on the floor next to me, buzzing with messages I won’t read.
Everything hurts, but none of it feels.
I sit up slowly, the kind of slow that makes your stomach churn and your thoughts fall out of order. Slowly, I drag myself into the kitchen, rinse out a coffee mug, pour water instead. It tastes metallic and wrong. I don’t finish it. I open the fridge, stare at the contents. Takeout containers, half a bottle of wine, and a forgotten lemon.
I close it again.
The silence in the apartment is different now.
It’s mocking.
Too quiet, too aware of me. Like it knows I’m not just sad but sinking. Slowly. Quietly. Without grace or poetry. Just a girl alone in a mess of her own making, held together by mascara and stubborn pride.
I haven’t showered. My hair’s a disaster. My skin feels wrong.
But I sit at the kitchen table anyway, staring at the untouched notepad full of Olive’s wedding details. I should work on the seating chart. I should finish the vendor confirmations. I should do something.
Instead, I lower my head to the table.
And I cry. Not the kind of sobbing from the bathroom floor or the stairwell at the hospital. This is worse.
This is the quiet cry.
The one where you don’t even make a sound.
The one where your whole body folds in on itself and you don’t know if you’re mourning what you’ve lost or who you used to be.
This is what the bottom looks like.
And there’s no one here to pull me out.
The tears dry eventually. They always do. But the heaviness doesn’t lift. It settles deeper, like sediment, until I’m made of it. Until I can’t tell where the sadness ends and I begin.
I stop opening curtains everywhere in the apartment, not just the living room. The light feels too bright, too judgmental. Like it’s got questions I’m too tired to answer.
I ignore my phone. I silence it. Let it buzz against the countertop like it’s calling for someone else. Maybe it is.
I lie on the couch for hours. The TV plays things I don’t watch. My computer screen sits blank with a blinking cursor that feels like a taunt.
Bonnie texts. Sam calls. Olive leaves a voicemail that’s sweet and chipper and full of post-baby glow. I delete them all.
I stare at the fridge like something inside it might fix me. Then I close it again. Half the takeout has gone bad. I throw it all away, too tired to even feel wasteful.
The dress I’m supposed to wear to the wedding hangs untouched on the back of my bedroom door. Still in the garment bag. Still pristine. I walk past it like it’s a corpse.
I take longer showers now. Not to feel clean, but because the sound of the water drowns out the thoughts. Sometimes I sit on the floor of the tub and let it run cold.
I’m not sure what I’m waiting for.
Not hope.
