Thomas Miller's Blog

Christmas Sadness
by Thomas Miller

The lights still glow, but not for me,
They shine for ghosts I cannot see.
Wrapped in cheer the world pretends,
While memory breaks where joy should bend.

The tree stands tall in borrowed grace,
A shadow dressed in former days.
Each ornament, a fragile lie,
Reflects the tears I do not cry.

Carols float through thinning air,
Songs for hearts no longer there.
Their echoes linger, soft and slow,
Like footprints fading in the snow.

The clock moves on, the season stays,
Repeating all its cruel displays.
Time forgives, but never heals
The quiet weight of what I feel.

Yet in this sorrow, dressed in white,
A candle fights the endless night.
Not hope, perhaps, but something true:
The strength to make it quietly through.

 

Episode 5 — Names and Numbers

By dawn, the rain had stopped, but the smell of it stayed — that wet asphalt scent that sticks to memory. Alchopya was already at the table, cigarette burning low, staring at an open ledger.

Jimmy Gillmore Jr. didn’t speak at first. He just watched Al’s hands — old hands, trembling not from age but from what they remembered.

The drive north was supposed to start at sunrise, but Al hadn’t packed. He just kept reading the same line in the book like it was scripture.

Jimmy sat down. “You’re afraid to go back.”

Al exhaled smoke through his nose, slow. “Afraid? Son, fear’s what keeps you from dying stupid.”

Jimmy pointed to the ledger. “What’s that?”

Al looked up, eyes red from sleeplessness. “Names and numbers. That’s what Culling runs on. Every life in that town’s a number — blood owed, favors traded, sins counted. Your father and I tried to zero out the math.”

Jimmy leaned in. “You mean you worked with him?”

“I worked against the same thing he did,” Al said. “But your daddy… he went too far. He wanted to erase the whole system. Burn the ledgers, stop the Culling for good.”

Jimmy’s voice dropped. “And you stopped him.”

Al didn’t answer. He just closed the book. The sound of it echoed through the shop like a coffin lid shutting.

“I didn’t stop him,” Al said at last. “I tried to pull him out. But he wouldn’t come.”

Jimmy’s pulse pounded in his ears. “You were there. That night.”

Al nodded once. “Yeah. And I almost didn’t make it out. There was fire, and something… else. The kind of thing that don’t bleed but still kills. You don’t forget that smell. It gets under your skin.”

Jimmy’s stomach turned. “You never told me.”

“Would you have stayed if I had?” Al asked.

Jimmy didn’t answer. He thought of Culling — the funeral home, the way the fog rolled down Main Street like it had a purpose. He thought of his father’s face, half in shadow.

“You said there’s someone waiting for me,” Jimmy said. “Who?”

Al lit another cigarette, shaking his head. “Someone who remembers more than I do. Someone who knows the real numbers. And if she’s still alive… she’s the only one who can tell you what your father traded for that peace he never got.”

Jimmy stood. “Then we go.”

Al stared at him, the fear plain now. “You don’t understand, kid. Going back there — it’s not just going home. It’s going under.”

Jimmy smiled faintly. “You said it yourself, Al. Fear keeps you from dying stupid. I think I’ve already used up my stupid.”

Alchopya smirked despite himself. “Your old man said the same thing once.”

They loaded the car in silence. The sun climbed over the Florida pines, but it didn’t feel warm. The highway ahead shimmered like a wound.

As they pulled out, Al whispered, “If Culling knows we’re coming, we might not get another sunrise.”

Jimmy’s reply was quiet but sure.“Then let’s make this one count.”

 

Chapter 2: Base Camp U

From the Pen of Thomas Miller

By morning, the smell of burnt plastic and chlorine hung over what was left of Universal Studios. The water in the lagoon shimmered a dull gray, rippling with ash. A few survivors wandered its edge, staring into the reflection of a sky that no longer belonged to Florida.

Base Camp U had risen overnight like a fever dream — plywood barricades, stacked crates, sandbags, and movie set walls pretending to be real fortifications. Inside, every sound felt amplified: the clank of metal gates, the hum of generators, the static hiss of radios that picked up more silence than news.

Donny sat on a bench near the old Men in Black ride, rubbing dried blood from his forearm.
Across from him, Kevin McCorm was trying to patch a wound on a teenager’s shoulder — one of the lucky few pulled from the I-4 evacuation convoy before it burned.

“How’s it look?” Donny asked.
“Like hell’s taking numbers,” Kevin muttered.

The boy wouldn’t stop shaking. His Disney wristband was still on. He kept whispering something about his mom — that she’d “just wanted one more day at the parks.”

The government had gone silent overnight. No orders, no rescue drops, no updates. The only broadcast came from an emergency frequency on a battered radio:

“Stay indoors. Stage Three transmission is airborne. Do not approach the infected.”

Donny looked around. Nobody was indoors. Everyone was either building walls or breaking down.

That afternoon, a group of new survivors stumbled in — half from I-Drive hotels, half from the theme-park bus lots. One of them carried a hazmat case stamped with a faded government seal. Inside were six glass vials and a note labeled PHASE 2 TRIAL.

Kevin read it twice, jaw tightening.

“They were still experimenting,” he said quietly. “Even after it started.”
“They knew,” Donny said.
“Yeah. They always know.”

He set the case down beside a pile of theme-park maps. Someone had circled the area around the old Soundstage 23, scribbling “quarantine” across the top.

That night, Donny couldn’t sleep. He sat outside the barricade, watching the Universal globe turn slowly in the smoky wind. The letters had started to melt, drooping like candle wax. Somewhere beyond the lake, a distant voice was singing — a child’s lullaby twisted thin and broken.

Kevin joined him, tossing a can of cold beans his way.

“You think they’ll send help?” Kevin asked.
“Help doesn’t come to places like this.”
“You always were the optimist.”

They both laughed — the kind of laugh that isn’t joy, just the body remembering what it used to do before the world ended.

Then came the horn.
Three short blasts. One long.

Every survivor froze. That was the signal for breach.

Gunfire snapped through the night. The barricades on the Simpson’s side collapsed in a shower of sparks and screams. From the dark alley near Hollywood Rip Ride Rockit, the infected poured through — hundreds of them, faces twisted in a parody of joy, mouths frozen in open laughter.

Donny grabbed the crowbar, Kevin his sidearm. They ran toward the chaos, through smoke and flickering lights.
The loudspeaker above the main gate crackled once more:

“Attention Base Camp U… containment has failed.”

The voice stopped mid-sentence.

Donny swung his crowbar into the first infected, bones crunching under the blow. Kevin fired until his clip ran dry, the muzzle flashes painting ghosts across the park walls.

When the dust settled, only silence remained — and the slow creak of the Universal globe, still turning as if the world hadn’t just ended twice.

Donny dropped to his knees, sweat and soot dripping into his eyes.
Kevin crouched beside him.

“You think this is it?” he asked.
“No,” Donny said, breathing hard. “This is just the next ride.”

Above them, a billboard flickered one last time —
“Welcome to the Adventure.”

Then the power died.

 

Episode 4 — The Moon Owes Us Nothing

The storm broke at midnight.Florida rain doesn’t fall — it pounds. The kind that makes you believe the sky is washing something off the earth. Jimmy Gillmore Jr. sat on the porch of Al’s shop, watching the water flood the gutters, cigarette between his fingers, that old photograph still burned into his head.

Al. In Culling. Standing right there beside his father.

He’d looked younger, yes — cleaner, sharper — but those eyes didn’t age. Those were the same eyes that had told Jimmy to keep the lights soft. The same eyes that now watched him from the doorway.

“You saw it,” Al said. Not a question.

Jimmy nodded. “You were there.”

Al stepped out into the rain, letting it soak him. “I’ve been a lot of places I shouldn’t have been. But Culling?” He laughed low, almost a growl. “Culling’s a place that never lets you leave clean.”

Jimmy’s hand tightened on the photograph. “You knew my father.”

“I knew what he tried to do,” Al said. He lit his own cigarette, rain hissing on the flame. “He thought he could stop it — the Annual Culling, the blood tax, the old rituals. Thought he could bury the town’s ghosts the same way he buried its people.”

“And you?”

“I helped him.”

Silence. Just the rain, thick and heavy. Jimmy could barely breathe. “Then why didn’t you save him?”

Al’s voice cracked, but only once. “Because your father didn’t want saving. He made a deal. A bad one. Some debts outlive the dead.”

Jimmy stood up, anger shaking through him like lightning. “You were there when he died.”

Al looked away. “I was there when he chose to die.”

The words hit harder than thunder. Jimmy wanted to shout, to throw the photo, to demand every answer Al kept locked in his head — but something stopped him. That same ache that had followed him from Culling. The one that whispered, You don’t want the truth. You want the reason.

Al walked back inside, slow and quiet. “Tomorrow, we drive north,” he said. “There’s someone who’s been waiting for you.”

Jimmy stared after him. “North?”

Al flicked off the porch light. “Yeah, kid. Back toward where it all started.”

The door shut. The only light left came from the moon, reflected in the puddles. Jimmy crushed the cigarette under his boot.

He didn’t want to go back. But something deep down — that haunted blood in his veins — already knew he would.

He looked up at the dark sky and whispered,“The moon owes us nothing.”

 

Episode 3 — Keep the Lights Soft

The mornings in Flora came slower now. Maybe that was mercy. Jimmy Gillmore Jr. used to wake to screams in Culling — sirens, clattering drawers, his own heartbeat counting down. In Florida, it was the hum of the refrigerator, the hiss of the coffee pot, the faint radio static of a preacher three counties over.

Al had rules about the shop.Rule #1 — Never ask what’s in the locked drawer.Rule #2 — If you can’t sleep, keep the lights soft.

Jimmy didn’t understand that one until tonight.

The rain came down in slow, heavy drops — Florida rain, the kind that feels alive. Al had gone out to meet someone, saying only, “Old business.” Jimmy stayed behind, patching a radio, when he heard it: a knock — not at the door, but at the back wall, where the paint bubbled from old repairs.

He froze. One knock. Pause. Two knocks.

His mind went to Culling, to the funeral home basement, to his father’s whispered joke — “The dead are polite, son. They always knock before they come in.”

He laughed now, softly, like maybe if he sounded brave, the fear would back off. He turned the light down low — just as Al’s rule said — and opened the back door.

No one. Only the dark alley, the dripping awning, the soft shimmer of a puddle reflecting the shop’s sign. But on the threshold lay something small — a handkerchief, folded neat, with the initials J.G. Sr. stitched in red.

Jimmy’s chest went tight. He hadn’t seen that handkerchief since the day the town buried his father.

When Al came back, the old man didn’t say a word. He took one look at the cloth, nodded once, and poured two cups of coffee.

“Time to open the drawer,” Al said. “But we keep the lights soft.”

Jimmy sat across from him. The world felt smaller — like the shop itself was holding its breath.

Al slid the brass key across the table. “You ready?”

Jimmy nodded.

Inside the drawer wasn’t money, or weapons, or anything that made sense. It was a photograph. Culling — the night of The Annual Culling Festival — crowds, lights, and his father standing on the stage beside the mayor. But in the back of the picture, blurred but unmistakable, was Al.

Jimmy looked up. “You were there.”

Al didn’t flinch. “We all were, kid. We just remember it different.”

Outside, the rain started again, and the power flickered. The lights dimmed to a soft orange glow.

Jimmy thought about leaving, about running like before. But instead, he said, “Then tell me everything.”

Al smiled, tired but alive. “Tomorrow,” he said. “If the lights stay soft.”

And for the first time in years, Jimmy didn’t feel cursed — he felt ready.

Chapter 1: The First Shot

From the Pen of Thomas Miller

The sun had barely climbed over the flat Florida horizon when the first scream came from the hospital in south Orlando.

It wasn’t a tourist scream. Not the kind that came from roller coasters or overpriced hotel surprises.
This one was wet. Human. Real.

Donny Row had heard plenty of sounds in his life — the hum of power tools, the whistle of air compressors, the sweet grind of metal under pressure. But nothing like that.
He stood in the hallway outside the patient wing, still wearing his construction uniform, still thinking this would be a quick job — a few hours fixing drywall after “some minor incident.” That’s what the call had said.

But then the alarms started.
Then the doors locked.

Inside, the “vaccinated” patients were convulsing, breaking bones they didn’t seem to feel, veins pulsing black beneath the skin.
The government nurse shouted for help.
Then she started biting.

Donny bolted. He didn’t wait to see what came next. The security lights flickered as he crashed through the stairwell door, the smell of antiseptic and fear chasing him down.

Out in the parking lot, the morning light burned too bright, too normal. He could still see the skyline — Disney’s castle spire in the distance, Universal’s globe gleaming under a tourist sun.
But something was wrong.
Something deep in the air.

He fumbled for his phone, called his best friend, Kevin McCorm.

Kevin was already at the Universal gates, ambulance parked sideways across the entrance, red lights flashing against the archway like a warning beacon to the world.
He answered on the second ring.

“You seeing this on your end?” Donny panted.
“Yeah,” Kevin said. “We got ‘em here too. The ones from the shot.”
“How bad?”
“You ever seen someone smile while their eyes rot out?”

The line went dead.

By noon, the highways were closed. Every news station said the same thing: “Stay calm. The situation is contained.”
But Orlando was already lost.

Disney fell first.
Families trapped inside, waving from balconies as the infected stormed the gates. The news drones caught glimpses before the feed cut — Mickey ears floating in bloodied water, the castle burning from within, a voice over the intercom still saying, “Have a magical day.”

Down I-4, Universal fought back. They used the props, the barricades, the old movie sets. The gates of hell had opened — and Universal turned itself into base camp.
It was messy, desperate, and loud.

Donny made it there by sunset. His truck rattled across the empty parking lot past crushed strollers, abandoned suitcases, and one lone balloon that drifted across the asphalt like a lost prayer.

Kevin met him at the barricade. His paramedic uniform was torn, his face streaked with soot and fear. Behind him, the old Horror Make-Up Show theater had become a command post.
The park map sign had been spray-painted: “BASE CAMP U.”

“You made it,” Kevin said, gripping his shoulder.
“Barely.”
“They’re calling it Stage Three Infection.”
“I’m calling it the end.”

They stood there for a moment — two men who used to laugh on these same streets, who once stood in line for butterbeer, who cheered when the fireworks exploded over the lake.
Now the only fireworks came from gunfire.

Night fell fast. The screams got closer.

From somewhere deep in the ruins of Disney, a red glow rose like a dying star.

Kevin stared at it, whispering, “They said it was safe.”

Donny tightened his grip on the crowbar hanging from his belt. “Yeah,” he said quietly.
“They said a lot of things.”

And with that, the first shot of the new war echoed through the empty streets of Orlando. 

The Cannon Fodder Generation: The Ballad of Timmy

By Thomas Miller
Timmy wasn’t dumb, not really—just shaped that way by the world. He could lift an engine block but couldn’t spell “engine.” He believed what he was told, every last pixel of it. That made him perfect.
By 2037, the rich had gone to the moon colonies. The clever had gone underground. What was left was the new army—kids raised on short clips, sugar, and screens. They called it Peacekeeping Mission 29, but everyone knew it was World War III wearing a different hat.
When the recruiters came to the high school with free pizza, Timmy thought it was the best day of his life. They promised travel, honor, “hero status.” He signed his name with a grin and a greasy fingerprint. He didn’t ask where the war was. Didn’t ask who started it. He just wanted to belong—and belonging was enough.
They didn’t train him the old way. No drills, no maps, no history lessons. Just a headset. “It’s like your favorite game,” they said, “only real.” Timmy smiled wide. His kind of war. The news called them The Brave Ones. Behind closed doors, they called them what they really were—Cannon Fodder.
Civics was gone. Literature, replaced with AI summaries. Thinking for yourself? Too political. They didn’t need thinkers anymore. They needed bodies that followed orders and reloaded fast. And Timmy was good at both. He believed the screen. He believed the flag. He believed the voice that told him who the enemy was this week.
He didn’t know what country he was in when the missile hit. Didn’t know why the villagers screamed at the flag on his shoulder. He thought they were cheering. Then the air turned red. The noise became something alive. Joey—his best friend, barely eighteen—was hit in the face. A clean hole. Timmy just stood there, rifle shaking. “We were the good guys, right?” he asked. No one answered.
Back home, the parades rolled on. Plastic flags. Plastic smiles. The paper called him a hero. “Local Boy Serves Proudly Overseas.” His mother cried every night waiting for a letter that never came. Online, his picture went viral. #BraveTimmy trended for a week. But nobody remembered the boy himself. He wasn’t a hero. He was a headline. And headlines fade.
The night the sky split open, Timmy pulled out his cracked phone. His face was half in shadow, eyes wide like a child again. “Hey,” he whispered. “It’s me. Timmy. I think we were lied to. They said it’d be like a game. Said we were fighting for freedom. But I don’t even know what that means anymore. I just want to go home. If there’s a home left.”
He hit upload. The signal blinked. The drone strike came a second later. The sky burned white. The video never reached anyone. The satellite fried first. Then Timmy.
They called them brave. But bravery without wisdom is just obedience dressed in flags. They marched the Cannon Fodder Generation straight into the teeth of the machine—kids who knew how to shoot but not why. Raised to consume, not question. Fed dopamine instead of truth.
And in towers far above the noise, the architects of it all watched from their filtered domes, sipping imported air, whispering to one another, “As long as they’re too dumb to ask why, they’ll never say no.”

 

Episode 2 — The Drawer

For the first time since leaving Culling, Jimmy Gillmore Jr. smiled. It wasn’t much, just a twitch of the mouth that said maybe the world isn’t done with me yet.

He’d spent a week sweeping Al’s shop, fixing coffee, and learning how to listen to silence. Al never asked questions about Culling; he just let Jimmy breathe.

Then came the drawer. Old wood, brass handle, lock so worn it looked like it wanted to be opened. Inside: an envelope with Jimmy’s name. His name — written in red ink.

Al said, “Not today, kid. Some stories need time to open themselves.”

Jimmy didn’t push. Instead, he walked outside, sun burning through the Florida haze, and realized something new — maybe peace wasn’t quiet. Maybe peace was waiting.

Tomorrow could hold ghosts, or luck, or both. For now, he’d take the air, the sun, and the strange comfort of knowing his story wasn’t finished.

Welcome to the End: The Orlando OutbreakBegins

By Thomas Miller

Hell isn’t coming — it’s already here.

This new blog series is a journey into a world that fell apartfaster than anyone expected. A world where the “safe” became thedangerous, where the happiest place on Earth became the gates ofhell.

It all started in a hospital just outside Orlando — the touristcapital of the world. The government promised protection with asingle shot. “Get vaccinated,” they said. “Stay safe,” theysaid. But when the screams began echoing from behind the hospitalcurtains, it became clear that safety was just another illusion.

Theme parks turned into battlegrounds. Disney was the first tofall, its magic kingdom overrun by the infected. Down the road,Universal became humanity’s last stand — a fortress of survivorswho refused to give up.

Tomorrow, we’ll begin the story through the eyes of DonnyRow and Kevin McCorm — two lifelongUniversal fans who never imagined their favorite park would becometheir only refuge.

This is the beginning of The Orlando Outbreak, aserialized apocalypse story told from the pen of ThomasMiller.

If you love horror, survival, and a touch of dark irony, staytuned. The gates open tomorrow.

Would you like me to make a cover image for thisintro post (title + “By Thomas Miller” in your usual blogstyle)?
And would you like the series title to stay “TheOrlando Outbreak”, or do you want a different title like“Hell at the Theme Parks” or “The OrlandoInfection”?

I keep the lights low because they tell the truth about a room. You can’t lie to a dim bulb. It leaves all the small betrayals visible — the coffee ring on the nightstand, the stack of notebooks pretending to be a future, the echo of a voice that said, “I’ll call you back,” and then turned into weather. I’ve lived long enough to see my name turn into weather.

There was a time I believed in softness the way other men believe in engines or money. I mailed a letter to a woman once, careful script, a stamp like a prayer. She never wrote back. Her silence returned heavier than any parcel, and I’ve been paying its postage ever since.

People think the bottle is the point, but it’s just a door you never meant to open, then can’t remember how to close. I didn’t drink to forget; I drank to thin the air between me and the ache — like pressing a bruise to be sure it’s still yours. Some nights I stopped because I wanted the pain clear, like glass. Some nights I started because I wanted it blurred, like rain on a windshield. Either way it stayed.

I tried to be easy to love. That was my first mistake. If you walk softly through a cruel world, the world calls it an invitation. Most days I felt like an open window in hurricane season. People admired the breeze. Nobody stayed.

The neighbors talk through walls like the living and the dead share a hallway. On one side a couple argues about money; on the other, a television sells things that promise a fresh start. I don’t believe in fresh starts anymore. I believe in what keeps starting even when you beg it to stop. Like morning. Like memory. Like that soft part of me that refuses to die no matter how carefully I starve it.

I wrote poems in spiral notebooks, whole galaxies of phrases that could not save me. I wrote the word love so many times it started to look like a scratch I’d worried into the page. I wrote the word stay once, and the paper ripped clean through.

No one taught me how to be a person who keeps going. They taught me how to be polite while sinking. They taught me how to apologize for drowning quietly, so as not to disturb the guests. I learned to applaud other people’s survival stories with hands too numb to clap for my own.

I sit in the half-light and listen to the dog in the next apartment. He knows everything. He knows the moment I stand, the moment I falter, the moment I try to swallow the sky. When I weep he presses his body against the wall like a doorstop against a bad wind. Dogs believe you without paperwork. Dogs don’t make you audition for worth.

There’s a mirror across the room. It’s cracked the way truth gets cracked: nobody means to break it; they just can’t carry it without dropping something. I look at myself and try to remember if there was a version of me that wasn’t composed entirely of after. After they left. After I failed. After the last good thing forgot my name.

Rage arrives in me like a weather front: a hot gust, a pressure change, birds going silent. It’s not rage at a person, not really. It’s rage at the vacancy that follows people around and sits down in your chair when they leave. It’s rage at the empty place where I thought love was supposed to happen, like a train platform where announcements keep apologizing for delays. “We appreciate your patience,” the loudspeaker says into the bones. But patience, like everything else, runs out.

I’m not brave, but I am thorough. I inventory my heart and find rooms I never visited because I kept them clean for guests. The dust, insulted by my attention, rises up in small storms. On one shelf sit the words I wanted to say to my father; on another, a poem I would have read at a wedding that never occurred; and in the corner, a chair with the imprint of a body that didn’t stay long enough to leave a dent. My museum of almosts, admission perpetually free.

The sadness is not theatrical. It doesn’t throw itself down and wail. It’s a clerk who never clocks out, a hum you no longer hear until someone asks, “Do you hear that?” Then you can’t stop hearing it. It files every hour under insufficient. It prints a receipt for every failure and hands it to me with professional courtesy. I sign each one, years of signatures, my name getting smaller until it’s just a line.

And fear — fear is the usher that keeps me in my seat long after the story should have ended. I am afraid of dying alone, yes, but more than that, I am afraid of being unwitnessed. I can imagine the act, but not the absence, the way the room would go on arranging itself without me. Mornings I am not in. Afternoons where my cup dries into a fossil. Nights where the hallway learns my silence by heart and recites it to the radiator.

If I am confessing, let me confess this: I wanted to be ordinary. I wanted groceries and someone who remembered which bread to buy. I wanted a voice calling from the other room, asking if we were out of coffee filters, and the dull joy of answering yes. I wanted to be bored with a person and grateful for the privilege. But I was always either too much or not enough — a door stuck open, or a door that wouldn’t open at all.

Once, in a plastic chair under a church basement’s fluorescence, I said my name to a room of soft nods and folding chairs. “Keep coming back,” someone said, and I did, until my last sincerity ran out and my smile became inventory. No one was unkind. That’s the worst part. Evil I could have fought. Kind indifference has nothing for the fists to do.

Tonight the air feels like a verdict. I hear my name in the static of the heater. I count the cracks in the ceiling the way sailors count stars. The dog gives a single, decisive bark, as if to insist that I remain at the center of the sentence. I write a note and tear it up. I write another and fold it twice. I make promises to nobody and keep them for a minute.

If you asked me what I want, I would say: sit with me in the dark awhile. You don’t have to light anything. Just breathe at a human pace. Remind the room how it’s done. I don’t want to be saved. I want to be with. Saving implies a ladder; with implies a hand. I have always preferred hands to ladders.

I go to the mirror and practice the face I would make if someone loved me. It isn’t convincing. Love has a way of ironing out certain creases, and I never learned how to fold my grief so it wouldn’t wrinkle the whole garment. Still, I try. Still, the face refuses the lie.

The word stay returns. It taps the glass like a moth. It cannot break through, but it will not give up. I think of the dog, patient scholar of my collapse. I think of the woman who didn’t write back, and how that silence tutored me too well. I think of the boy I was, furious that the world made a game of chairs and stole his every seat. I want to tell that boy I kept standing as long as I could.

This is where the confession sharpens: I don’t know how to survive myself. I know how to disappear into the corner of a crowd, how to apologize in advance for needing anything at all. I know how to make a poem out of the ache and call it a life. But some nights the poem is only a key to a door that opens into a room with another door. Infinite architecture. No bed.

I listen for the dogs in the neighborhood, low conversations exchanged in code. They are not praying — they’re verifying. Are you there? one asks from two blocks over. Yes, the other answers. Yes, I am still here. The night is full of that old catechism, a choir of existence. It pulls a thread through me I thought was broken. I consider — this is embarrassing — I consider barking. Just the once. Just to mark myself on the map.

Instead I speak my own name. I say it out loud like a strange blessing: “Thomas.” I say it again: “Thomas.” It sounds like someone else, which comforts me. If I am someone else, maybe I can wait this out. Maybe the storm will spend itself against the walls and, finding me unbroken, will have to move along.

I sit. I pick up the phone. It is heavier than grief and lighter than hope. I scroll through names that are more idea than person, ghosts I keep fed with holidays and the occasional birthday. I do not press call. I press back, then notes, then new. The blank screen offers me the cleanest lie in the world: You can begin again. I don’t believe it. But I can pretend long enough to make a line.

I type: I wasn’t looking to be saved. I just wanted someone to sit with me in the dark. The sentence holds. It fits around me like a seatbelt, not a rescue, just restraint. I imagine how it would look printed and pinned to the fridge with a magnet shaped like an orange slice. I imagine a hand touching the paper in passing, the way you touch a memory to prove it is solid.

I keep typing. I confess to the dust and to the dog and to the light that refuses to commit. I confess to the rage that keeps asking for a fight and the sadness that keeps handing out scorecards. I confess to the fear that narrates my absence before I’ve even left. I confess to the love that, stubborn as moss, keeps greening what I declare dead. I confess to wanting the ordinary miracles: mail that includes my name for tender reasons, keys that turn, the sacred boredom of a person who has nothing to fear from nightfall.

I do not promise anything beyond this sentence. I promise this sentence. I will stay for the next line, and the line after that, and the dog’s next bark that means I hear you, and the neighbor’s kettle rising like a question, and the good, clean hiss of the radiator rehearsing how to be a sea. I will stay long enough to be bored, if boredom is what waits on the far side of this cliff.

If there is a god, let him be the god of small continuances: of switching the light bulb before it winks out, of washing the one cup and leaving it in the rack like a little moon, of answering the soft animal next door with the patience a creature deserves. Let him be the god of hands, not ladders.

It is late. The mirror keeps its truce. The room doesn’t forgive me, but it allows me. The phone is warm now, a small animal deciding I might be safe. I save the note and set the device down like a nestling. I pull the chair closer to the wall we share, the dog and I, and rest my palm against the paint.

“I’m here,” I say, and wait for the answering thump of his tail, a Morse code that spells out the only word I can believe in tonight.

Stay.