I have many supportive friends who help me.

Eleven at night, and the message sits unsent for twenty minutes because sending it feels like an imposition.

Then it goes. A reply comes back inside ninety seconds, and the thing that had been enormous for two days is suddenly a thing two people are looking at together.

Worry has a strange physics. Unsaid, in the dark, it expands to fill whatever space it is given. Said out loud to one person who is fond of you, it shrinks — not to nothing, but to something with edges and a measurable size.

Friends are not useful here because they have answers. They are useful because saying it to a face changes the object itself.