1:30 AM. She stares at the ceiling. The room is dark, with only the streetlights filtering through the curtains, casting blurred shadows on the walls. The day had clearly gone off track. From the very morning, everything had been wrong: small irritations piling up into a weight that pressed against her chest by evening, making it painful to breathe.
The place where a warm, beating heart once resided now clenched as if trying to disappear, to fold into itself and vanish. Neither cigarettes nor music nor the usual ability to distract herself had helped. Even books—her eternal refuge—remained untouched. She had no strength to read, no energy to follow a plot. It wasn’t the time for them.
Her body was drained, her thoughts tangled, but sleep wouldn’t come. The tightness in her chest was slowly easing… How can something hurt when it has already blackened and rotted away? Buried and left to be devoured by the monster.
The worst evening in a long time—at least in terms of physical sensations. Sometimes she thought: surely, it couldn’t get any worse. But experience whispered otherwise. It always could.