(This is a sort-of spoiler-y review, because I don’t know how to separate my reaction to the book from what happens in the book. I mean, I could just give you a brief idea of what the book is about: Last man on earth and last people trying to get back to earth from Jupiter after a mysterious event has created some sort of apocalypse. And I could also tell you I adored it, that I found it moving and memorable and utterly captivating. But I can’t explain why without spoiling it a bit. So, read at your own risk.)

Books about apocalypse are sort of my thing. How does the world end? How do the very few survivors manage to survive? Will they be able to preserve humanity? Is it even worth saving? In the absence of social structures, do survivors descend into inhumanity or create something better? How does it feel to be at the end of everything?

(I have a theory that the current blossoming of post-apocalyptical literature (and dystopias; they are different, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise!) are an expression of our deep terror about global climate change, nuclear destruction, and all of the other clever ways we’ve invented to destroy ourselves.)

It’s what I like about zombie novels, not the flesh-eating undead themselves, but what the living do.

Good Morning, Midnight, by Lily Brooks-Dalton, is about the end of the world, but it’s not exactly a post-apocalyptic novel. It tells two different stories: that of Augustine, a brilliant astrophysicist who chooses, when the Arctic outpost he is working at receives some vague news about some sort of world-wide problem, to stay at his post instead of being evacuated; and that of the crew of the Aether, a space ship that is returning from an expedition to Jupiter to a silent Earth.

This book was totally unexpected. I thought it would tell a sort of The-Martian-esque story, about scientists sciencing stuff and managing to save the world. I thought the people on the Aether would rescue Augustine and then solve the apocalypse problem and move forward.

I totally thought we would find out what happened to the world.

But none of those things happen.

So that’s what I mean when I wrote that it’s not exactly a post-apocalyptic novel. It isn’t a novel about people dealing with an apocalypse because the method of the end is never explained. Instead, it is a novel about people dealing with loneliness. Extreme loneliness, yes, and it is the byproduct of an apocalypse. But the apocalypse is only the method, the tool by which they are forced to struggle through this loneliness.

I loved this book so much.

It is part Snow Child, part Z Nation (there are no zombies), the tiniest bit The Martian, a little bit Station Eleven (more in tone than theme), with some The Dog Stars and just a dash of Radiance, but those are just the books (and one TV show) it was evocative of. It still felt unique, one of the books that will trickle into my thoughts for a long while.

There comes a time, in any book I am reading, where I ask myself why am I reading this? This question comes from a bunch of different sources, adult guilt over spending time just reading being one of the most influential, but it’s also about the quality of the book. Is what I’m reading worth (“good enough,” I guess I am asking) to quantify the guilt of being an adult who reads instead of _________ (cleaning the kitchen, cleaning the bathroom, folding laundry, vacuuming the car, whatever else I should do but am ignoring). I didn’t ever feel this guilt before I got married, but as I got married when I was barely an adult, and as I married a non-reader who definitely doesn’t see the value in just sitting in a chair reading a book, I’m not sure if it’s an adult feeling or just a situational one.

Anyway.

Girl in Pieces by Kathleen Glasgow is a book that made me ask why am I reading this? for a different reason: why read a book that is so dark? (I wrote about my history with sad novels here) It tells the story of Charlotte Davis, previously homeless, living, as the novel starts, in a health facility specifically for people who self-harm. Before she was admitted, she was living on the streets, running with some other kids who would gang-mug the men who tried to take advantage of them; before that she was barely-living at home with her mother, with whom she had a pretty rocky relationship.

Charlotte’s story is told in two parts, her time in the hospital and then her time afterward, when the health insurance money runs out. She’s supposed to go back to live with her mom, but her mom doesn’t want her to, so she cobbles together enough money for a bus ticket to Arizona, where her friend Mikey lives. Charlotte is definitely not ready to leave the facility when she is forced to; she has started learning some coping skills but has to figure out which ones work while living one disaster away from being homeless again.

I think the why am I reading this? question sparked up for me so often with this book because it seems like it has almost too many issues. Homelessness and the way society fails homeless people and poverty and under-age drinking and drugs and mother/daughter conflict and the failure of the healthcare system and the emotional and ethical limits of mental-healthcare providers and living wages and art and the power of creativity and suicide and friendship and a friend who suffered brain damage from a suicide attempt and trust and learning that not everyone deserves trust and romance and emotionally-abusive romance and physically-abusive romance and, oh yes, cutting. It’s a lot.

But somehow, it worked. It creates a portrait of a person trying to create a workable life, to figure out which path is hers and what choices she is in control of. I appreciate that it makes the point about mental health issues and how they are almost the same as addiction (the first step is admitting you have a problem): until a person chooses to try to cope, she won’t cope. She has to have help learning how, but the choice to actually do it is hers.

My biggest gripe with this novel is the bike, the damn yellow bike. Charlotte arrives in Arizona with literally almost nothing, just what she has in her backpack. But then all of a sudden she has a bike. A yellow bike. But it never says where she got the bike. (I went back and re-read some sections, just to make sure.) I think that’s the product of poor editing and the fact that this is a debut novel, and perhaps the overabundance of issues is too.

But I can (almost) forgive (but not likely forget) the bike, if only for the author’s note at the end, where she explains why she wrote a story about self-harm. It is one of those mental-health conditions that is hard to imagine unless you have experienced it (unlike, say, anorexia, which to me is highly imaginable). I imagined a teenage girl who is a cutter picking up this book and finding parts of herself in it, and I know there are people who would say she shouldn’t read it because it will be a trigger for her, it will make her cut more, but I find that argument debatable. Life itself is the trigger. But if she read it all the way to the end, and then wasn’t put off by the thought of an author’s note, and then read it, she would read that one in every two hundred teenage girls self harms. She isn’t alone. And then, she’d read this idea: “Self-harm is not a grab for attention. It doesn’t mean you are suicidal. It means you are struggling to get out of a very dangerous mess in your mind and heart and this is your coping mechanism.” If she could read that and understand it, she might be able to choose something different. 

Why did I read this book? Why did I spend time with it when I could’ve been doing something the world thinks is productive? In the end, it is partly because of those library patrons, the ones who come in searching out sad books. Sometimes they talk to me, most of them don’t. But it’s there on the shelf—their “issue.” Their thing that might make them feel crazy and weird and unlike anyone else, and finding out that there are other people like you? That is also helpful to that all-important decision to choose to find a healthy way to cope.

I miss running.

I miss running so much.

I miss all of it: figuring out where to run, piling on miles, watching my monthly total go up. Looking for a race and then signing up for it and then not missing it but actually running it.

Running races.

Training for races: having a plan, having rest days, running long every Thursday. Imagining the course, shopping for a race outfit, buying a new pair of socks (I always race in new socks).

Or, running when I’m not training for a race, and working on getting stronger and faster.

I miss running on hot July mornings when for the last miles a sweat beard swings on my chin.

And running on those warm early-spring days when you don’t expect it to not be cold, and you step outside and it isn’t cold, and so you race back in and put on your running clothes and go running.

Autumn running—I’ve missed two consecutive years of autumn running, when the mountains are on fire and the air has that cool zing to it.

I miss feel strong and in shape and confident in my body.

More than anything, I miss running without fear.

I’m not a stranger to exercising with sprained ankles; it’s a thing I’ve done since I was a gymnast. I’m not afraid of pain.

But I am afraid of falling again.

(This is the last Ragnar I ever ran and I was JUST AS PISSED as I look like in this race photo. This was the worst Ragnar leg EVER, and to make it worse it wasn't described correctly in the race mag, so at the end I was hot and thirsty and SO PISSED OFF.)

I took my first tumble during my night leg of a Ragnar race four years ago. I caught a rock with the side of my foot, twisted my ankle hard, and went down. There were a few runners behind me but I told them I was OK and they kept going, and I tried to shake it off and keep going, because it was a leg without van support (as, literally, every single one of my Ragnar legs were) and what choice did I have? I walked for a bit, and then I started running, and then I twisted it again out of sheer ligament strain, I’m sure. A fire went up the tendon on the outside of my leg, like a bad special effect in a cheesy movie, only under my skin. (I walked the rest of the five miles of that leg. And then the next morning I got taped and I ran ten more miles. Downhill. Praying not to fall again and willing my brain not to feel the ankle pain. I’m not sure it was exactly the right choice.)

When I went down the second time in, oh…ten minutes, I thought Gah, I hope this doesn’t change everything and then a little voice said this is going to change everything but I imagined it would mean in, say, thirty years when I was an old great grandma, I’d be Great Grandma Amy always complaining about her sore ankle, and saying “remember that time I sprained my ankle at Ragnar but I still ran fifteen more miles?” to Becky, and all of our grandkids and great grandkids would think we were crazy.

I didn’t really think that changing everything would mean right now.

Because while I ran another Ragnar and a couple of half marathons after that first ankle sprain, I’ve never really trusted it. My running psyche never really felt confident that I wouldn’t fall again.

I’ve been to countless PT appointments. Ice, stim, A-stem, massage, exercises. I’m best friends with the BAP board and really should just by my damn own.

Last year, I thought I’d found an answer in a PT who did needling, which is like acupuncture, sort of, but with electricity. My ankle felt the best it had since that night run at Ragnar.

But then this September I sprained it. And then in November I sprained it again.

And now, again, I am trying to be a runner.

I'm cross training and I'm very, very slowly adding running into the mix.

But I am afraid I will never be fully myself as a runner again.

I am still working out, but machines at the gym just aren’t the same. I think because they only move my body, not my spirit, I can’t seem to exercise enough to see any results. I’m feeling softer and softer, weaker and weaker. It is just so boring, slogging away on a machine inside a building next to other sweating exercisers. There is no exhilaration.

I’m doing my ankle exercises. I started with writing the alphabet in the air (in print and in cursive) and by now I’m writing Russian literature with my toes. Running man and dynamic calf stretches and stretches with a band. I balance on one leg with my eyes closed while I “watch” tv, I balance on one leg while I’m at work and when I’m standing in line at Costco and when I’m scrapbooking. You put me and a stork in a room and tell us to balance on one leg and I will kick that stork’s trash. (Unless I have to balance on my left—bad—ankle, and then the stork will probably beat me.)

And I’ve worked up to running one whole, entire minute, and then walking for three, and I can get 8 or 9 reps of this before the fire starts up my leg again. And honestly, it’s not even the fire. It can burn. It’s the looseness in the joint, the instability, the untrustworthiness. And it’s the way, as soon as I start into my running stride, that my brain starts imagining how I might fall.

I miss tying my shoes in the garage when everyone else is still asleep, and slipping out the side door. I miss running outside with the wind and the weather and the sky and the sun. I miss feeling confident enough to head out for five or eight or eleven miles because I knew I could always get myself back. I miss running Squaw Peak Road. I even miss jogging in place while I wait for a stoplight to turn green.

I just—I miss running. Deeper than my fear of falling is my fear of never running again, not like I used to, and I don’t want to be that person, the person who used to be a runner. I just don’t know how to get back.

I hope everything isn’t changed, really, forever.

So this is my appeal to the running gods: Please help me run again. I promise to never again be sad to sit on the race bus by myself, if I can just get strong enough to race again. I promise to never complain about blisters—in fact, I will cherish every blister I make. I promise to never again disparage my chubby thunder strong thighs again, but love them for carrying me the distance. (See what I did there?) I promise to make sacrifices to you in the form of new running shoes every 300 miles or so. I will captain a relay team. I will volunteer at races. Did I ever take running for granted? Maybe. But I promise to never again.

Just let me be a runner again.

Books about reading and books are a favorite of mine.  The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry is a recent one; The People of the Book, and The Book Thief, The End of Your Life Book Club and the wacky If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Possession, certainly, and The Shadow of the Wind. 84 Charing Cross Road (went I went to London I made sure to go to Charing Cross Road, even if the bookstore from the book is gone now) and My Reading Life. And of course, Fahrenheit 451, which is, I think, the book that started my interest in books about books.

So obviously I couldn’t resist The Reader by Traci Chee, a YA fantasy set in a world without books. I thought it would be a fantasy version of 451, where books are illegal but some people still have them anyway. Instead, it is a society where books just don’t exist. They aren’t a part of the culture. It’s a landscape made of several large islands (reminiscent, just the smallest bit, of Wizard of Earthsea), with each island having its own government and many of the islands battling each other for resources.

Sefia, the main character, has been living on the run with her aunt Nin since her parents died. They carry what they need in their packs and hunt for game as they go; sometimes they enter different towns or villages to sell the pelts they have collected. One day, when Sefia is returning from a village, she discovers that Aunt Nin has been captured. She watches from the woods while the strangers beat her aunt and then, when she won’t tell them where “it” is, they load her over a horse and take her away.

The movement of the book is in Sefia trying to track down the people who took her aunt so she can rescue her. The “it” the abductors wanted is, Sefia comes to realize, the only object that Nin saved from Sefia’s home after her father was killed, a rectangular thing with a metal hinge and paper bound inside: a book. Not just, you realize as the story progresses, a book, but the book, the only one left intact. The story moves between Sefia’s adventures; those of a boy named Lon, who is taken from his home to become an apprentice Librarian; and the seafaring story of Captain Reed (reminiscent, just a bit, of Gaiman’s Stardust). As she travels through the forest, Sefia picks up a companion, a boy named Archer who himself had been kidnapped and turned into a fighter; Sefia rescues him from being taken to the army.

Although I had a hard time imagining how a society would function without any form of writing—how do merchants keep track of what they buy and sell, for example?—and even though it was entirely different than what I expected, I really enjoyed this novel. It has just enough magic, without it being overpowering; I liked that Sefia was already strong before the story started (books with characters who suddenly discover they are expert trackers or archers or jiu-jitsu masters or whatever make me nuts) but that she discovered different things about herself. I liked the backstory of the mysterious secret society created to preserve bits of writing. And I liked the idea of the book, a magical book which is not just any book but one that contains all the stories, both living and invented, so that eventually Sefia and Archer, who have been reading about Captain Reed in the book, actually meet Captain Reed.

It’s very meta.

Mostly I like how books and the idea of reading are a type of magic in the world, because, let’s face it, books have always been magic for me (but of a very different sort than Sefia’s) and, I imagine, they are for most bibliophiles. Plus, there are interesting things done with the book itself. Like, some of the page numbers also have words, so there is a tiny little subtext you can read via the numbers. There are fingerprints and blotches here and there (I actually thought, when I noticed the first one, ah, crap, I smudged the book). Until they meet up, you “read” the story about Captain Reed out of the book in Sefia’s backpack (and it has its own series of smudges).

I suspected that this book would break my no-unfinished-trilogies rule, and it did. (The cover itself gives that away, too: it says pretty clearly that this is “Book One of Sea of Ink and Gold.) There is definitely a sequel or two to come. Some series I don’t continue reading, either because I didn’t get drawn in to the first book enough or because I didn’t feel like I needed more of the world. This one is a series I think I will follow, even though in a sense the first book felt like enough.

On Tuesday when I went to work, my boss (who is also one of my best friends) said “You aren’t wearing black today!” and I dug her in the rib with my elbow because she was right: I had on my kitten sweater, which is the softest thing I own (it’s not really a cardigan made out of kittens, but it feels like it) and happens to be bone white. And I wore light grey. It’s the first time I haven’t worn black in…I don’t remember how long.

Wearing black has long been code for depression for me. It’s also the color I feel the most comfortable in, so it doesn’t always mean “I’m stuck under the ice” but, when it’s literally the only thing I’m wearing…that’s a sign. When I was a teenager and black clothes were literally all I owned, my mom used to say “If you’d just wear some color you’d feel better,” which naturally made me want to go out and buy something new—and black. Because, yes, mother, wearing yellow or pink would totally fix everything, my snarky teenage self might’ve said. Except, I didn’t because I didn’t understand yet (and I don’t think she did either) that black wasn’t the sickness but a symptom of it.

But it’s also a choice. Wearing something non-black on Tuesday didn’t exactly help anything. The elephant is still sitting in the room (it would be so much easier to write about this if I could also write about what is happening, but I can’t), I am still down in it, and I don’t really feel better for having worn something non-black (does bone white and grey count as color anyway?)

Except, choosing to not wear black, even just for a day, does give me a small lift. Not the clothes themselves, but the choice. The control, the fighting back.

“Thank you for acknowledging my actions,” I didn’t say to my boss, because that would be weird, but it is what I thought.

Action.

Choice.

It’s hard to do those things when you’re stuck inside depression, but they are the things that are required to get you out.

So today I’m just writing a list of things I’ve done, choices and actions that will help me to start moving up out of the darkness. A sort of self-acknowledgement, a marker so I know I did some things once so I can continue doing some other things.

1. I signed up for a ballet barre class. I didn’t just go to the first free class, but I actually got out my credit card and paid so I could keep going. This was hard for me not because I thought the class would be physically too difficult (it’s actually perfect; it’s making me sore) but because I thought it would be filled with fabulous women. You know what I mean…wealthy, skinny, successful women who aren’t super friendly because they don’t need any friends because they already have a bajillion, equally wealthy, skinny, and successful. Fabulous! But, I found literally no fabulous women there. Just friendly ones, who introduced themselves to me and told me where to buy their cool non-skid socks and asked me about myself. The combination of social and physical was a balm to me. I have six weeks left and I intend to go as often as I can.
2. I saw my sister. Back in November Becky asked if I would want to go see Mamma Mia! at the new Eccles Theater in downtown Salt Lake with her, and I said yes, having no idea how awful I’d feel in February. If I could’ve not gone, I would’ve backed out (she doesn’t know that I actually thought about not going). But burrowing into my house and avoiding people is part of the problem. So I went. Just before the play started I told her a story that ends with Kendell saying “the damn lions are just so frustrating” and we started laughing and as I laughed I thought I don’t remember when I laughed last. Watching a play, wandering around a city, finding a restaurant and eating there on a whim just to see if it was good (it was): just not being inside my house. Laughing. Enjoying a story. Those are things I need but don’t give myself enough in the first place, but doing them with the woman I trust the most was a gift I didn’t know I needed.
3. I think that there is a perception that depression is the same as sadness over something happening. That is true, of course: I am devastated by what is happening. But not all difficult or devastating things lead to depression. I think this place I am in is a culmination of too many devastating things: so many surgeries, and the almost-dying in April, and the election and my sprained ankles and then this current experience; it was the last thing, the one that finally made all my coping mechanisms stop helping me cope. So, here is what I am feeling inside my depression: Grief. No one has died, but something has. I think I will feel this grief for a long time, even if the situation improves. There is something empowering about labeling what I am feeling. I am grieving because this experience is difficult (one of the hardest things I’ve experienced), and because it is the end of something, and because it is changing things in irrevocable ways. Grief, though. It is different than depression; it will last longer than the darkness. You cope with it in different ways, and to be grieving without being depressed is the closest thing to a goal I have. But just being able to say it, to understand it: it is a sort of a light.
4. I am pondering an ah-ha moment. A friend of my is working on a research project about mental health, and I answered her survey questions. One absolutely dropped me, or at least, my response did. “How do mental health issues influence your normal life?” she asked. As I thought about what I do to avoid or cope with depression—running, writing, making sure I go outside, trying to be cognizant of my thought patterns—I realized that who I am is so tightly connected with how I cope that they are the same. Who would I be if I weren’t trying to cope? Where could I put my emotional energy? This was a revelation to me. Perhaps I have been wrong in thinking that coping is the way to deal. What if I could actually heal instead of cope? What could I do then?
5. I am eating better. OK, not entirely healthy; I haven’t managed to eliminate sugar entirely. But I’m not stressing about 100% of anything. I’m just trying to do better, to listen to my body’s cues and eat only when I am hungry, to stop when I’m full, to put healthy stuff in my mouth as often as I can.
6. I went outside. It has been warm here in Utah; yesterday was 69 degrees. So I put on my running shoes and my favorite running skirt and I went to the mountains to walk on the river trail. It is still winter, colorless and drab, and the snow in piles by the trail is dingy and exhausted. But still. Moving outside: this is what I need the most.

Thank you for all of your comments on my last post. They mean the world to me. They mean light can still be found in dark places. They weren’t actions I took, but actions brought to me that were, to distort Kafka’s idea, an ax to the ice. My movements are small, there is still so much to break through…but I am moving.

A short little bit from a poem I recently read that I cannot get out of my mind:

It is as if
a steel clamp

Had seized upon
one square inch
of a flattened

Canvas map then
jerked sharply
upward:

The painted landscape
cracking along
unaccustomed

Creases, cities
thrown into shadow,
torqued bridges

Twisting free.
A life is not
this supple,

It is not meant
to fold, to be
drawn through

A narrow ring.

(from “Portrait of a Hanged Woman” by Monica Youn, Blackacre)

I have been reading a lot of poetry lately. I want to search out the ones that break me open, like this one; poems that are not about anything like what I am experiencing but that also resonate because they are, somehow, exactly what I am going through.

(Also songs, but that is a different post.)

I read this sitting in the pink chair that I scavenged from my mother’s house. This chair was in my bedroom when I was a teenager, and it was the space of refuge, the comforting place I went when I was caught in the dark. It’s covered in pink velvet, and when I scavenged it I did so with the intent of having it reupholstered, because by now it is bedraggled, more grey than pink, raw wood exposed on one edge, trim dangling—but I cannot bring myself to do it. The texture of that fabric against my fingers, even now nearly thirty years later…that texture is what it feels like to be cracking along my unaccustomed creases.

So I sat on the chair and I read poems and I remembered myself at 14 and 15 and 16, stuck in darkness, and compared that darkness to this one, and I realized how similar they are.

Almost the same place.

Except, I know now, at least, the triggering points. Sometimes, depression just arrives, blackness seeping in slowly until you are filled. Sometimes it is like a switch, the wave of a magic wand, the difference between one blink and another: not there, there, and the suddenness this time is because the last bit of my resistance has been broken.

I was up above it.

Now I’m down in it.

(A life is not this supple.)

For three weeks, I have left my house only for necessities: work, the grocery store, the driveway but only to shovel snow. I’ve stopped going to the gym. I didn’t snowshoe in our fresh snow. I haven’t visited any neighbors or friends or family. I even took a few mental health days from work.

I didn’t do anything besides stay home and eat unhealthy foods. Entire bags of chocolate, far too many hot drinks. Spaghetti and butter, English muffins and butter and jam, hash browns cooked in butter with cheese melted on top.

The darkness got denser and because of that it got harder to do anything and because of that the darkness got denser.

The chocolate and carbs that brought me brief little sparks of light made me sad, settling on my thighs and chin and belly, and I could only find more light with more chocolate, more carbs.

I played music but I didn’t sing.

I made things but I didn’t connect to them.

I wrote, but nothing real.

I cleaned the house, I cleaned every 8&*@!!($^[email protected] corner of my  ^&%%$*(@ house, I decluttered until everything was empty and then I didn’t feel accomplished but just…empty.

Then I had that moment, sitting on my old pink chair reading poems, and somehow that was enough. Just barely enough that, half an hour later when my husband walked into the (clean) house and said “let’s go to the gym,” I could say “OK.” I could pull on some exercise clothes and find my music and watch and shoes, and even though I slogged, I slogged through that workout (ten minutes of elliptical, ten minutes of the side trainer, ten minutes on the rowing machine), even though it was boring and uninspiring and ugly…I moved. I moved my body and some of the darkness moved too, like black, thick chunks of ice on a lake in winter at midnight during a new moon cracking, at last, just a bit.

A shift. Barely perceptible except I could perceive it, I could remember what it felt like to breath, I could put a stop to the endless cycle of darkness.

Maybe.

I would say “hopefully” but I don’t even have any hope yet.

I’m not even sure I should be writing this. What a crazy person she is, I hear all you readers saying. (“All you readers!” There are far more readers in my head than in real life I know.) Exposing herself like this. It’s weird, right? It’s a plea for attention, it’s sort of lame, it’s actually fairly pathetic, who talks about this anyway?

Who talks about it.

No one, or not many. And that makes it worse. Because it is not just that I am locked underneath all that dark ice. It is not that whatever my painted canvas map had been, it has been yanked through the smallest opening, it has been cracked and torn and everything colorful made meaningless.

It is that I am utterly alone.

And maybe if I talk about it, someone else won’t be alone. Maybe if I say: depression is a vicious cycle and the only person who can stop its downward spiral is the depressed person—maybe someone else will also have a moment in their (metaphorical) pink chair. Maybe their (her) cycle can break, too.

It is hard to speak out of the dark. It weighs so much my voice feels impossibly heavy.

But this is part of it too. Part of breaking the cycle is, for me, writing my way up out of it. Writing what is real, and hard, and ugly, and painful. Maybe I will never share publicly what pushed me into the dark water, what broke the last of my spirit and started the cycle.

Maybe it doesn’t matter how it started.

Maybe it just matters to know that I can end it.

With moving.

With writing.

With letting myself feel what I am feeling.

I confess: I’m still down here in the dark. I still feel like everything has been ruined in irreparable ways.

Who knows what my life or my psyche will look like on the other side.

But even just knowing that—even just saying “the other side.” That reminds me it wasn’t always dark and maybe the light will come back.

And maybe I am not alone.