I do not know how long I had laid on the ground for.
The mat had stopped feeling like anything a long time ago. My hip bone pressed directly into the stone beneath it and I had stopped shifting position because shifting position required energy and energy was something my body had quietly stopped producing somewhere between the second day and whatever day this was now.
The burning was constant.
Not dramatic anymore. Just there, the way hunger was there, the way thirst was there, a fact of the body that sat beside everything else and did not leave. I had stopped fighting it. Fighting it took the same energy as moving and I had already established where that supply stood.
I stared at the ceiling.
At some point, without deciding to, I started to cry.
Not the way I had cried as a child,
