The Weight You Can Put DownChapter 22 of 222 min
Until the morning
The window has changed colour and you did not see it happen.
It is not light yet. It is the other thing that comes first, where the curtain is a different grey from the wall and the room has edges again. In a while the heating will come on. Somebody will start a car. It will be whatever day you already know it is going to be.
That is the whole of what the morning is. It is not a figure for anything. The one this book means is the one with the car in it, a few hours from where you are sitting.
And none of this is a reason to go without help.
If the surgery is shut, there is an out-of-hours number. And if tablets have already been taken, or what you would use is in the room with you, that is not a surgery matter and not something to sit out until morning: it is the emergency number, tonight, because that is the one that brings somebody to the door.
Nothing here describes dying.
You have been in this hour before.
More times than you could count, and some of them were worse than this one. Every one of them ended. You were not consulted. You did nothing to deserve it and nothing to bring it on.
There is nothing to take from this book.
None of it has to be remembered. There is no page to come back to, and nothing stops working if you have forgotten the whole of it by the weekend. It was never the sort of thing you were meant to keep hold of. It says one thing, and the one thing is not improved by being memorised. You cannot put it right. You can put it down. Those are different acts, and only one of them needs anybody else to agree to it.
Whatever went down tonight is on the floor and not in you.
And whatever did not go down will keep. It has waited this long. It will wait until the morning.
It is not a promise anybody is making. It is what the morning does, whether anybody is in the room or not.
It is doing it now, at the edge of the curtain, while you sit there.