The Weight of Quiet
The alarm goes off at 6:15, and Lila lies there for a full minute before she moves, staring at the ceiling like it might offer her an excuse not to get up. It doesn't. It never does. The popcorn texture above her bed has been the same for seventeen years, and today it holds no answers, just shadows cast by the gray light seeping through her curtains.
Outside, the fog has rolled in thick over the cul-de-sac, swallowing the mailboxes and the tops of the maple trees. She watches it through the gap in the fabric, this soft erasure of the world, and thinks that whoever invented the phrase *brain fog* must have woken up in a room just like this one. Everything outside blurred at the edges. Everything inside her the same.
She sits up. Her limbs feel like they've been filled with wet sand overnight, some cruel alchemy that happens between midnight and morning, turning a seventeen-year-old girl into something ancient and slow. Getting from the bed to the bathroom takes effort she doesn't have language for, not really, not language anyone would believe if she said it out loud. *I'm tired* doesn't cover it. *I didn't sleep well* doesn't touch it. There isn't a sentence in English that…
