Anchored in the Long Afternoon

The afternoon stretches out, a long, flat expanse where the pain in your body feels like the only thing that is real. You watch the world move outside your window—people rushing, performing, living lives that seem to have no room for the slow, quiet suffering you carry.

It is easy to feel forgotten in the middle of the day, as if the light has moved on to brighter, louder places. But there is a promise that cuts through the noise of the healthy: no one will snatch you out of my hand.

The grip holding you is not loosened by your fatigue or your isolation. You are not drifting away because you cannot keep up.

You are being held with a strength that does not depend on your own. The light is not in the rush.

It is in the stillness where you are forced to stay. You are not abandoned in this long middle.

You are anchored.