You Are Still
Breathing

You wake up at 4:47 AM.

The alarm isn't set for another thirteen minutes, but your eyes open anyway because your body no longer trusts sleep. Sleep is where the ambushes happen — where time disappears in chunks you can't afford to lose, where a foot swells with infection overnight, where your immune system stages quiet coups that end in emergency rooms and machines you don't remember agreeing to.

You stare at the ceiling. The darkness has texture now. You've memorized its patterns across all the other nights that looked exactly like this one.

Your phone is face-down on the nightstand. You haven't touched it since yesterday evening. No notification light bleeding through the edges — you already know this, but you pick it up anyway and turn it over.

No messages.

You set it back down.

Your chest feels like someone is sitting on it. No one is there. Just you, and your heart doing its job badly — racing for no reason except that it has internalized fear as a permanent operating condition.

You think: Just get to work on time.

It's such a small thought. Four-year-olds can manage it. Your coworkers will do it today without a second thought, get their coffee, complain about traffic, and never once feel like they survived something just by walking through the door.

But you are not them.

You are someone for whom "just getting to work" requires the alignment of a dozen variables you cannot control. The bus. Your blood pressure. The swelling. The FMLA math. The sleep you didn't get. The dread that has no name but lives in your chest at 4:47 in the morning.

You swing your legs out of bed. Your feet touch the floor — cheap laminate that's supposed to look like wood but feels like cold plastic. You don't have slippers because slippers are the kind of thing you buy when you're building a life, and you're still just trying to keep one.

Stand up.

The room tilts. You grip the edge of the bed and wait for your blood pressure to remember what it's supposed to do.

Don't pass out. Don't get sick. Don't miss work.

You've missed four and a half hours this month. You're allowed fifteen before they let you go. The math is simple. The margin is razor-thin. You're walking a tightrope made of attendance policies and federal paperwork, and below you is nothing — not a safety net, not a soft landing. Just air and whatever comes after air.

You brush your teeth. The face in the mirror is technically yours, but it doesn't feel like it anymore. It's older. There's something behind the eyes that wasn't there four years ago — something that watches you instead of being you. Like a witness that moved in during the crisis and never quite left.

You look away first.

In the kitchen, you open the fridge. There's food — not much, but enough for today. Maybe tomorrow. You run the calculation automatically, the way your brain has learned to: if the paycheck posts when it's supposed to, and if rent doesn't increase, and if nothing breaks, and if your body doesn't betray you again, you'll be okay.

You close the fridge.

The word okay is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

You check your phone again.

Still nothing.

You tell yourself it doesn't matter. You tell yourself you don't need anyone. You tell yourself this is what adulthood looks like: standing in your own kitchen, feeding yourself, going to work, paying rent on time.

But underneath that voice is another one — quieter, younger, less trained:

Why doesn't anyone check on me?

You silence it the way you've learned to silence a lot of things. Quickly. Without ceremony.

The bus is late.

You stand at the stop with three other people who do not look at each other. This is the unspoken contract of public transit: we are all ghosts to each other here. Visible but not seen.

Your leg bounces. Four minutes until late becomes a conversation you don't want to have. A look you don't want to receive — the one that says you're the problem employee. You are not the problem employee. You're just the one who can't afford to be.

The bus comes. You board. You sit in the back and grip your bag like it's something you have to protect.

The city moves past the window. Buildings. Cars. People starting their days like it's easy. You wonder if any of them count hours the way you count them. Know that fifteen is the number that separates employed from unemployed, housed from unhoused, okay from not okay at all.

You wonder if anyone on this bus has ever been homeless.

You have.

For four years.

The thought arrives without warning — it always does — and suddenly you're not on the bus anymore.

You're standing outside a gas station at 2 AM because you have nowhere else to go. Everything you own is in two bags cutting into your shoulders. You're deciding whether it's safer to sleep in the park or keep walking until sunrise, because walking means you look like you're going somewhere, and looking like you're going somewhere means people leave you alone.

You're in an emergency room with shingles, pain moving through your body like something electrical, and the nurse is asking if there's anyone she can call.

You say no.

She looks at you with something like pity. You hate it — not her, just the look — because pity is what people offer when they've already decided not to help.

You're in the ICU with pneumonia and sepsis, machines beeping in a language you don't speak, drifting in and out. Every time you surface, you check the door.

No one comes.

You're being chased by three men, legs burning, breath ragged, thinking this is how I die in the same flat voice you'd use to say this is how you make coffee. No drama. Just fact.

You survive.

All of it.

And no one is there to see it.

The bus jerks to a stop. You blink. You're back.

Your stop.

You stand. You exit. You walk the last two blocks to work. Your badge is clipped to your shirt. You scan it at the door. The light turns green.

You're on time.

The relief is so immediate and so disproportionate that it almost makes you dizzy — and you know, in that moment, exactly how far from normal you still are.

You sit at your desk. Log in. Open the training modules. Around you, people are talking. Someone laughing about something that happened over the weekend. Someone else complaining about WiFi. Normal things. Things that belong to people whose biggest problem is inconvenience.

You try to join in. You smile when you're supposed to. You nod.

But inside, you're running the numbers.

If I can just make it through today. If I can just pass this training. If I can just get the first full paycheck. If I can just pay rent on time. If I can just not get sick. If I can just —

The ifs pile up the way they always do. You're balancing on top of them, trying to breathe, trying to look like someone who has it together.

Lunchtime. You eat at your desk because you didn't pack anything and can't afford to buy something. You tell people you're not hungry. They believe you because it's easier than asking questions, and you know that, and you let them.

You check your phone.

Still nothing.

You open your messages. Scroll to your mom's name. The last text is from three months ago — you sent it, she didn't respond. Your thumb hovers over the keyboard. Something simple. Something that doesn't ask for anything.

Hey, just checking in.

You don't send it.

Because you already know what happens next. Not cruelty — just the particular silence of people who love you in ways that don't include showing up. And that silence is somehow worse than anything loud.

You put your phone away.

The training is about Medicare. Rules, codes, exceptions, edge cases, scenarios you rehearse like scripts. You take notes. You answer when you're called on. You will pass this training.

You have to.

Because if you don't pass, you can't stay. And if you can't stay, you can't pay rent. And if you can't pay rent —

You stop the thought before it finishes. One thing at a time. That's all you've got. One thing at a time.

Five thirty-five PM.

You clock out. You leave. The bus home is crowded and you stand, holding the rail, swaying with the motion. Your body is tired in the way that has nothing to do with rest — the kind that lives in your bones, the kind that comes from carrying weight no one else can see and not having anywhere to set it down.

You think about the people around you. You wonder which ones are carrying something like this. Which ones have checked a door in an ICU and found it empty.

You unlock the door to your apartment. Step inside. Close it behind you.

You stand there, keys in hand, not moving.

This is your place. You pay for it. It's clean. It's furnished. It's yours.

But it doesn't feel like home yet, because home is supposed to be the place where someone knows you're alive. Where your presence is noticed. Where the silence means peace, not absence.

You set your keys down. Take off your shoes. Walk to the kitchen. Open the fridge out of habit, not hunger. Close it.

Sit on the couch.

And then the feeling comes — the one you've been outrunning since 4:47 this morning. It starts in your chest. A tightness. A pressure. A weight that has been there longer than this apartment, longer than this job, longer than you can trace to any single origin.

Your throat closes. Your eyes burn. The air won't go all the way down.

And you're crying.

Not the managed kind. The kind that comes from somewhere deep and old and cracked open — the kind that sounds like an animal, that makes you cover your mouth even though you're alone. Because the habit of making yourself small and quiet runs that deep now.

You cry because you're tired in a way sleep has never fixed.

You cry because you went to the hospital twice and no one came.

You cry because you almost died and the world kept moving like it didn't notice.

You cry because you love your family and they feel like strangers.

You cry because you're still here, still showing up, still doing the math, and it feels like it shouldn't be this hard just to exist.

You cry because you're lonely in a way that has no clean solution.

When it finally stops, you sit in the silence. Face wet. Chest aching. You feel empty — not better, not worse. Just emptied out. Like something got released that didn't have anywhere else to go.

You check your phone one more time before bed.

Nothing.

You set an alarm. You lie down. You close your eyes.

And you think:

I survived today.

Not a victory. Not a triumph. Just a fact. The most honest thing you've said all day.

Tomorrow, you'll have to do it again.

You are still here.
You are still breathing.

No one is coming to save you — and somewhere along the way, you stopped waiting for them to. You save yourself, one hour at a time, even though it shouldn't be this hard. Even though you deserve more than survival math and empty nightstands and doors that no one walks through.

You do it anyway.

Not because you're exceptionally strong. Not because you've unlocked some spiritual secret.

Because the floor was yours to get up from. And you got up.

The cracks are still there. But you're still here too — and that's not nothing. That's the whole thing.