You were promised a mitigation of pain, yet you remain the legacy of an ache. It still hurts to move sometimes. There is a fear so consuming you embody it;, you are the apotheosis of dread itself. And you’ve been sent enough articles to know sleeping through the day is a bad sign, but it seems you can’t breathe without it becoming a symptom. So draw the blinds, unplug the phone. Count days, count breaths. It seems the trademark of the radical transformative is its fictitious nature - the overnight cure if you will. You’re not naive but your perpetuation relies on hope, so sometimes the line blurs. You boil the water to let the tea go cold on the side, you get dressed to drive empty backroads - every action seems to be outlined with futility, every ineffectuality a point proven. Better not to try at all really. Time is a refractory beast and you are at its mercy. I mean, we all are, if that makes this any easier for you - I doubt it does. But like I said, the overnight emancipation is rarely a reality, especially when you are both prisoner and martinet. Perhaps that’s why you’re thinking in these absolutes - the way your progress can only be defined as such if it fits with the narrative you have spun: that complete recuperation is the only event worthy of celebration. This is a dangerous game, but you know it so well. It is funny though, how your perception of yourself is so often the least reliable, because you don’t tend to notice when you first start getting better. It’s only in retrospect, reciting the week’s events to a colleague, that your breath catches and you realise. Realise time didn’t stop in the supermarket, that the tea didn’t go cold. That the days feel softer against your skin - it won’t be gritted teeth and bruised knuckles forever. The heaviness will lift, even if it takes a little longer than we’d like.