I called for the sun and he came.

I called for the sun and he came.

He slipped in without ceremony, the way he always does, quiet at the curtain's edge before committing to the room. Dust rose to greet him, floating in evidence of all the days that had passed undisturbed. He cast his theatrical glare across the chair, found the empty mug, the clothes in their patient piles, something unfinished on the plate. He noted it all and said nothing. That is his way.

He has not always been able to find me so easily. For a long time, something else was keeping the curtains drawn on my behalf. That thing.

That thing that moved in without asking and immediately had opinions. About what I wore, as though my clothes were its autobiography. About my friends, who it decided, quietly and firmly, were too much trouble. About my bed, which it considered a reasonable place to spend the better part of a life. It rearranged my hours with the authority of a landlord who has forgotten they are a guest.

It believed itself to be kind. This was perhaps its most exhausting quality. It spoke of protection while building walls, offered rest while stealing motion, wrapped its hands around my days and called it shelter. The thing did not think it was hurting me. That was the thing about the thing.

Come night, it became an archivist. It would wait until I was most defenceless, until the dark had thinned me down to nothing, and then open its careful files, every regret cross-referenced, every failure annotated, every small cruelty I had ever received or caused presented in chronological order for my consideration. And then, when I wept, it would stay. Sit right beside me in the dark, patient and close, almost warm. I have not yet decided whether that was mercy or the deepest cruelty of all.

It had opinions on my menu too. Some weeks it put me on a quiet diet, removed appetite like a privilege I had not earned. Other weeks it filled me past the point of feeling, as though fullness could be a kind of forgetting. My body, faithful and bewildered, listened either way. It always does.

But today I called for the Sun and he came. Without ceremony. Without making a fuss about how long I had kept him waiting.

That felt, in its small way, like something.