Pause

I’m stretched out across the bed diagonally, like I never meant to land here but somehow did, too tired to move. The sheets are a little twisted, too warm in places, not warm enough in others. I haven’t changed them in days. I don’t remember how many. The room is dark, not pitch black but the kind of gloom that seeps into your skin and makes everything feel slower, heavier. The blinds are mostly closed, but they’re old and broken. A few of the slats have come loose from the strings and hang at odd angles, like crooked teeth in a tired mouth.

Usually I open the windows first thing, every single one. I do it like it matters. Like it saves me. I believe in the light. I really do. I believe in the ritual of letting in as much of it as I can. I fling the blinds wide open, I push the windows up even when the screen rattles and the wind blows in dust. I like hearing the street noise and the birds, the sound of someone’s kid shouting down the block, the occasional bark, the river wind. It reminds me I’m alive, and not locked away inside some version of myself that can’t find her way out.

But today the blinds stayed down. They stayed broken. The windows are shut tight and the hum of the air conditioner fills the silence with a low mechanical sound, just enough to drown out the real world. I turned it on the minute the fever started. Couldn’t take the wet, pressing heat that settles in this city when the river starts to sweat. The air gets thick and slow and smells like pavement. And when your skin is already burning from the inside, it feels like the world is closing in on you.

So yes, the room is dark. And I don’t like the dark. It makes everything worse. It makes my thoughts louder. My chest tighter. I don’t trust the dark. It’s where the sad things grow. And I guess that’s what this is. Sadness. Or sickness. Or both. I don’t know anymore.

P said last year I ran away on Father’s Day. I don’t know if he meant it to hurt me. Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe it just slipped out, the way people say things when they’ve been holding them too long. But I remember. I remember not being able to breathe in the house, not being able to sit at the table with the memories and the expectations and the ghosts. I remember walking for hours, maybe aimlessly, maybe trying to find something—space, air, quiet, God. I never really found any of it, but I found enough distance to come home again without falling apart completely.

This year I haven’t left the bed. I’m curled up like a question mark. The fever has taken hold, or maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s not even real. Maybe I just told myself I was sick so I could disappear again. I took the test. The pink line appeared slowly, like it was unsure. Faint. Barely there. But it was there. Or was it. I keep staring at it, trying to figure out if it’s real or if I made it up. Trying to decide if this is COVID or just another way my mind has tried to save me by making me stop.

I’ve done that before. Gotten sick just when things were about to unravel. My body shuts down before I even know I need it to. It’s like some part of me knows I can’t handle one more thing and decides to pull the emergency brake. Only I’m the one left lying here, sweating through the sheets, unsure if I’m avoiding the world or if the world is avoiding me.

Maybe both.

I want to get up. I want to lift the blinds and let the light in. I want to believe that it will make a difference. That if I just do the small things, everything else will come back into focus. But today I can’t. I just can’t.

So I lie here in the dim, broken light. Listening to the air conditioner whir. Counting the slats that still hang in place. Wondering if tomorrow I’ll see the sun again. Wondering if I’ll ever feel like myself again, if I even know who that is.

Maybe I’m not running away. Maybe I’m just trying to rest. Maybe that’s all this is. A long, dark pause before something new begins.