IRIS

Today, I don’t get out of bed until the sun is past its highest point in the sky.

The light that seeps through the curtains is soft and golden, nothing like the cold gray of yesterday, but it doesn’t matter. My body still feels like lead. Every inch of me aches, inside and out, as if the tears I shed by the lake were just another form of training, one that pulled just as hard on every muscle.

I lie there for a while, blanketed in silence. I think about moving. I don’t. I just breathe. Slow, and shallow, waiting for something inside me to catch up.

Eventually, my...