I wanted to move forward so badly it ached, and most days I couldn't find the part of me that knows how. I was drowning in something I can't name out loud, not to my family, not to my friends, not even fully to myself, and underneath every ordinary thing I do, there's a woman quietly asking when this is going to lift.
I've gone on the dates. Nice men, nice restaurants, and I still came home just as far from myself as when I left, because the emptiness wasn't sitting across the table from me. It was already inside me before I sat down.
My friends and I talked, but most of it still didn't reach very deep, like everything had to pass through glass first, and only the easy things made it to the other side. I'd gotten good at only handing people the parts of me that are safe to hold.
My family wanted to see me smile, and I gave it to them, because it's simpler than explaining that some days I feel like I'm dying quietly on the inside while I sip coffee and ask about their week. I've learned how to look fine. I still haven't learned how to actually be fine.
At night, I would write in my journal because some part of me still believed in it, even when the rest of me didn't. I wrote down what I hoped for, what I dreamed about. And somewhere in the same paragraph, without meaning to, it turned into a plea to the Universe asking why it's taking so long, asking when, asking if I'm doing this right, if I'm doing anything right at all.
Then I put my robe back on and got back on the same corner of the couch, and I told myself the same thing I told myself yesterday. Maybe tomorrow I'll feel like moving through my own life instead of just surviving the inside of it. "I didn't know if tomorrow would be the day. I only knew I was still writing it down, still hoping for it, even from that couch, in that same unfinished sentence of a life.
And if this letter finds you there tonight, in your own version of that same couch, know that you are not alone in it, and your tomorrow will come when you're ready for it. Maybe tomorrow."