There is a night, somewhere in the middle of a long unraveling, when you sit on a floor.

I am not going to specify the floor. The floor in my version was a kitchen floor. Yours might be a bathroom floor, a hallway floor, the floor of a car you pulled over to the side of the road. The floor is not the point. The point is that you sit on it for somewhere between forty-five minutes and two hours, and you try to figure out, very honestly, whether you are about to do something you cannot take back.

I will not tell you what I was afraid of doing. The reason is not that it is too dark to put on the page. The reason is that I do not want anyone reading this to feel less alone by knowing that whatever you have considered, I have also considered. I do not want to be the worst-thing comparison. I want to be the survival comparison.

What I will tell you is this. Not getting up is not a triumph. Not getting up is, in the case of certain nights, the entire job. The entire job, on certain nights, is the negative one: not doing the worse thing. The body waits. The night turns. Some hours later, the worse thing has lost its appointment, and you stand up because your knees hurt, and you eat a piece of bread because you have not eaten anything since lunch, and you go to bed.

That is what happened to me. There is no scene with a redemptive sentence. The night just kept being a night, and at some point it became a different night, and I survived the first one by accident.

I am writing this from the other side of that floor. I do not know that I am safely on the other side. I know that I am, for now, on the other side. For now is the only kind of safety the night gives back.

If you are reading this on a floor: not getting up is the entire job tonight. The next chapter will be there in the morning.