Therapy Bits

The night is a room with no doors. I lie on my back, a guest of shadows, listening to the silence breathe through the cracks in the walls. Sleep hovers at the edge of vision, a translucent animal that refuses to be caught, slipping away whenever I turn toward it. My mind is a lantern I cannot extinguish, spilling light onto everything it touches—old conversations, unfinished lists, the ache of a word I forgot to say years ago. The hours unravel like black thread, knotting themselves around my ribs. I count the rhythm of my own pulse, try to rock myself on its steady beat, but the body resists. It is a child unwilling to be soothed, thrashing beneath blankets. Outside, the stars hold their vigil with cruel patience, glittering as if to remind me of everything awake in the universe. By dawn, I have bargained with silence, with time, with the weight of my own eyelids. Sleep never arrives, yet still I wait for it—faithful, as if waiting for a lover who will not return but whose absence has become the closest thing I know to company.