I closed the residential wing door and did not turn the light on.
It was not an oversight. I noticed myself making the choice — the specific preference for darkness rather than light, for the window's ambient glow rather than the overhead fixture that would have made the room look like a room I was functioning in. I did not want a room I was functioning in. I wanted the room to be dark.
I sat on the floor.
Not the chair. Not the desk. The floor, with my back against the wall below the window, with the ambient light from outside making everything in the room a suggestion rather than a fact.
I had been holding too much for too long. Not the triage-ward kind of holding — the ongoing kind. The kind that accumulated across months of operational continuity, across decisions that cost somethi
