My Mother Texted That I Was Locked Out, but By Morning I Had Made a Few Calls

I had stopped registering it as pressure and simply thought of it as the texture of my life.

That night I slept without waking once. No phantom sounds of impact wrenches. No mental inventory of unpaid invoices. No anxiety about whose emergency I would be asked to absorb next.

For the first time since I was a teenager, I went to bed knowing that if something continue reading …