the loneliness of chronic illness

The body that once carried you easily has become a heavy thing, a prison of pain that feels like the only truth left. The house is quiet, the medicine is taken, and the loneliness of being unwell settles like dust in your chest.

You feel so alone in this, as if no one could ever know the weight of this specific ache. But there is a father who ran to a son while he was still a long way off, too covered in the filth of the road to be recognized, and he did not wait for a clean confession.

That same light is in you now, in the midst of the fever and the fatigue, and it has never been broken by the sickness. You are not your diagnosis, you are the drop of light that the night cannot overcome.