Rising

It is almost two in the morning and my head is splitting open from the inside. The pain does not spike and fade. It stays. It pulses with every beat of my heart, a steady percussion that refuses to let me forget my own body. Even lying still hurts. Especially lying still hurts. The television flickers across the room, its pale light sliding over the walls without care or permission, as if the room itself belongs to something indifferent and mechanical.

I roll onto my side, then onto my back, then back again. Nothing helps. My neck locks. My jaw tightens. My eyes burn from staying open too long, but closing them does not bring sleep. Sleep feels like a rumor people tell each other, something that belongs to other lives. My body resists rest. It vibrates with discomfort. It argues with itself.

I want to yell. I imagine the sound rising up out of me, sharp and reckless, but I swallow it. Noise would not fix anything. It would only make the room louder. What I want is erasure. Heavy sleep. The kind that shuts everything off and gives nothing back. Instead, the night presses closer. The air thickens. The weight in my skull sinks deeper, and I am trapped inside it.

Time slows in these hours. It does not move forward. It circles. Minutes stretch into something viscous. Morning feels theoretical, like a promise written in pencil that can be rubbed out before it ever happens. I lie there and wonder if the sun will really come back, or if the night will just keep folding in on itself.

This is the part of life no one asks about.

No one asks what happens after the dinner parties, after the smiling photos, after the last glass is set down and the doors close. No one asks what it feels like to be alone with your own body when it turns against you. They see the public version. The clean version. The version that fits inside a caption.

They see laughter. They see vacations. They see neat rooms and good lighting and moments arranged to look simple and satisfied. They do not see what happens later, when the noise drains out of the house and pain takes its place. They do not see the exhaustion that clings no matter how carefully you live. They do not see the hours spent negotiating with your own nervous system just to stay still.

It feels like living two lives.

There is the life people recognize, and then there is the private one that quietly corrodes you. The one where you sit in the dark with your pulse in your temples and your thoughts looping the same questions. The one where survival looks less like heroism and more like endurance.

I am tired, but not in a way sleep could fix.

I am tired of negotiating with myself. Tired of explaining my own existence back to me. Tired of waking up already behind, already bracing. Some kinds of fatigue settle into your bones. They do not leave when you close your eyes. They stay with you while you brush your teeth, while you answer messages, while you pretend to function like someone who is not quietly unraveling.

I am tired of fighting people too. The ones I trusted easily. The ones I believed without caution. It takes a special kind of exhaustion to realize that the story you were living inside was not real, that the loyalties you leaned on were softer than they looked. Disappointment does not arrive loudly. It arrives in pieces. It arrives as confusion first, then silence, then the slow understanding that something you relied on no longer exists.

There is grief in that, even if no one dies.

It is the grief of expectation. The grief of believing someone would hold you and finding your hands empty instead. It settles in your chest and stays there, not sharp enough to scream about, but heavy enough to carry everywhere.

Some nights it presses harder than others.

When the world outside finally goes quiet, there is no distraction left. The mind gets louder. Old scenes replay. Arguments you never finished. Conversations you wish you had. Futures you assumed would unfold and did not. At two in the morning, the brain becomes a museum of unfinished things.

I lie there and count the ways I am still awake.

The hum of the television. The tightness in my shoulders. The ache in my skull. The way my heart keeps proving that I am still here whether I want to participate or not. My body does not care about my thoughts. It keeps moving forward on its own schedule.

It is strange how chaos becomes normal.

After enough years of instability, the nervous system learns to live in alert mode. Even rest feels suspicious. Silence feels loud. Calm feels temporary. You start to believe that if things are quiet, it only means something is about to break.

A year ago, I thought I had reached the lowest point of my life.

I remember believing that sentence. I remember saying it with conviction. There is comfort in imagining a bottom. It makes pain feel organized. It tells you the suffering has a limit. That once you touch the floor, the only direction left is up.

But life does not move in neat arcs.

What I thought was the bottom turned out to be a ledge. A narrow place you stand on while the ground continues shifting beneath you. There were more losses. More rewiring. More moments when I had to accept that stability is not a permanent condition, but a temporary agreement between you and the universe.

Everything kept rearranging itself.

Some mornings I woke up already mourning something I had not fully named yet. Some days felt normal on the surface, and underneath, they were already collapsing. Pain does not always announce itself. Sometimes it just waits quietly until you notice that nothing feels anchored anymore.

And yet, here I am, still awake, still breathing through a headache at two in the morning, still writing instead of disappearing into the noise.

That surprises me.

There are moments when staying feels accidental, not heroic. When survival is not about strength, but about inertia. About the simple fact that the body keeps moving forward even when the mind is unsure what it is moving toward.

I used to believe endings arrived all at once. Big, cinematic, obvious. Now I think they happen in fragments. In late nights. In lost trust. In headaches that refuse to leave. In the quiet realization that the life you were protecting has already changed shape.

Maybe that is what this is.

Not an ending, but a dismantling.

Not collapse, but reassembly.

It does not feel inspiring when you are inside it. It feels disorienting. It feels lonely. It feels like lying awake while the rest of the world sleeps and wondering how many versions of yourself you have already outgrown without noticing.

But sometimes, in the middle of the ache, something else flickers.

Not hope exactly. Not optimism. More like awareness. The sense that even in discomfort, something is shifting. That pain is not just punishment, but information. That exhaustion is a language the body uses when it wants you to listen differently.

Maybe the night is not here to break me.

Maybe it is here to slow me down long enough to see what still wants to live inside me.

The headache pulses again. The television mutters to itself. The room stays quiet. And I stay here too, breathing through it, waiting for whatever comes after the dark finally decides to loosen its grip.

Not because I am certain.

But because I am still curious enough to find out.