Sam woke, heart pounding, at exactly 3am. She didn’t set an alarm anymore, the electronic clock by her bed replaced lately by the nightly rise of panic inside herself, always culminating in the violent shock of jolting from sleep, gulping air, thoughts recirculating in her mind like contaminate trapped in a broken air conditioning unit. There was half a mug of cold peppermint tea on her bedside table which she sipped, willing it to calm her better than it evidently had a few hours ago when it had still been warm. A specific thought chased itself. If the project deadline was in ten days then you still have to run all the revised figures, still have to get them signed off, still have to draft the paper that nobody will read, still have to attend the daily stand up, still have to fit it in around year end. You are behind and ten days isn’t enough. And you wasted yesterday when eleven days wasn’t enough. The thought looped back for a repeat visit. Closing her eyes just gave it momentum. She opened them and started her exercises, named five things she could see. Clock. Mug. Mirror. Dressing gown slung over a wardrobe door. Empty space where you used to lie next to me. Then name them with description. Really see them. Grey cube with dull black numbers radiating from its front reading 3.04. White mug with a capital L printed on one of its sides, faded now but once a bold red. The mirror is propped up on a dressing table opposite the bed, silver framed, flaking at one corner, a smudge on the glass. My dressing gown is a pale blue, three quarters length, pocket bulging with tissues. The empty space is just that: empty. The last part of the exercise now. Her heart rate was slowing. Don’t just see them. Remind yourself about them, about the memories attached to the objects. Connect them. I bought the clock a few weeks ago after resolving to keep my phone out of reach in the bedroom, part of a new set of rituals to sleep. It had been cheap and its alarm wasn’t particularly cheerful: a brash single electronic note that seemed to operate at the same abrasive volume irrespective of how it was set. The only upside of waking at 3 was that I never heard it. The mug had been part of a set we’d bought together. Four in total that spelled out L O V E or, as you never tired of finding funny, V O L E. The other three were all broken, two by accident, the O on purpose after you left. I smashed it one night after trying to make a coffee to sober up a little, in the solo drinking phase that kicked in for a few weeks. It had fallen apart easily. I appreciated the metaphor. I’d kept the L. but I don’t know why. The mirror is smudged from yesterday’s hairspray. Another morning rushing to be ready after another disturbed night. I rubbed it with a make up remover pad but not before staring through it at my now distorted, disguised face, at my indistinct fuzzy edges. The pad just smeared the residue across the glass. Blue is not your colour was one of the things you used to say. I’m not sure why I didn’t tell you to fuck off but I didn’t. I used to avoid it and dressed in polite pastels and muted beige. Black. Grey. The dressing gown was the first piece of clothing I bought afterwards. In truth I didn’t really even like it but it was the first blue one that I saw. And there’s too many memories about the empty space. Too much connection. She closed her eyes, felt her breathing settle.

She knew, despite the reprieve from her anxiety, that she wouldn’t sleep again now. The panic was gone but replaced with a numbing sense of loss that she felt like a weight, pinning her to the bed. If she didn’t rise now then she feared she might not muster the energy to rise again. The thoughts about work were still there but in the background now, submerged under the memories of him, of them, and the project and the deadline felt distant now, remote, rather than urgent and real. Somewhere in her mind she registered that this was the pattern from last night, the night before, the night before that, and that her ten remaining days would soon be nine, but she felt too exhausted to do anything other than file that information for later. She was fairly sure it’d surface at 3am the following night. She resolved, at least, to put some different objects within sight of the bed so that she could change up her exercise.

She lifted the duvet. It was cool in the room and she lay for a moment, feeling the slight chill on her bare arms, letting it take her attention. Feet on the wooden floor now, reassurance in its solidity, pressing her weight through her toes. Grounding was another one of the exercises. She stood and pulled back one of the curtains, the night sky had become part of her new routine but tonight it had little to show. The moon was absent and other than Venus she couldn’t pick anything out; she had an app on her phone to track constellations but if she retrieved it then she wouldn’t be able to resist checking her email, checking her Teams messages, doom scrolling the news, and watching the social algorithms unwittingly mock her existence: five tips for banishing anxiety, why men leave, blue dresses for this Spring, why you procrastinate, living your best life alone, defence against panic attacks, sleep like a baby. The app could wait.

Sam ran through the list of things her counsellor had suggested for switching back off, finding sleep again. Light yoga. She could see her mat buried underneath a pile of clothes and the idea of picking through that many hastily bought blue sets of matching underwear held no appeal. Deep breathing. This felt more achievable but she knew you couldn’t maintain focus on ‘the golden thread’ or whatever she was supposed to call it, not whilst the work thought was still lapping the inside of her brain. It was on the far side of her mental track right now but only whilst she kept distracted. Breathing would give it time to return. Listen to calming story on mindfulness app. This never worked. For starters there was still the problem of resisting the pull of every other dopamine driven distraction on her phone to consciously pick the one that was supposed to switch all that off. And the stories were shit. There was one about a train ride through the Canadian Rockies, slowly intoned by a very deep voiced man, in which literally nothing happened. She got that there was supposed to be something soporific in his tone, in the repetition, in the idea of the movement on rails, forwards but a barely perceptible rocking, but she would get bored and invent events on the train. A discarded briefcase carrying twenty grams of cocaine and a loaded gun. The driver suffering a heart attack as they sped through a red signal. A woman waking up, confused, believing that she is in hell and all the other passengers were demons. Maybe that last one was too close to home. None of it worked. None of the active attempts at relaxation: moving, breathing, listening. She pulled her dressing gown from the back of the wardrobe and went downstairs.

She made a coffee and sat in her conservatory under a blanket she’d left there as a practical acknowledgement that she was routinely waking up before the heating came on each morning. Resetting the thermostat clock seemed like admitting defeat entirely. She checked her phone, its pale LED the only light in the room. There were a string of messages from Penny who texted in a very particular format, one sentence at a time or sometimes just a handful of words. Missed you today. Don’t WFH tomorrow. I swear. Barbs. I can not do the risk workshop without you. Promise. Me. Come in. Sam smiled at “Barbs”, she thought Penny would have let go of that by now but it seemed to have stuck, a hangover from the time they’d driven to Bristol for the department’s annual community day and she’d surprised both of them with a word perfect run through of No More Tears (Enough Is Enough). Mainly the Streisand parts. Hence, Barbs. It had been a few months after he left which may have explained the force of her delivery and also the floods of tears at the end. Penny tried to keep skipping to something that might cheer her up but all Barbra was channeling on that playlist was heartbreak: Memory, You Don’t Bring Me Flowers, The Way We Were. Eventually she hit Don’t Rain On My Parade and finally succeeded in making Sam laugh by singing it in the broadest Brooklyn accent she could muster and repeatedly asking her if she wanted to stop for “cwoffee” at the next services.

Scanning back across the staccato messages she settled on ‘risk workshop’ and she felt the tempo of her heartbeat rise slightly. Closing her eyes she could visualise the to-do list in her OneNote, the slightly different one in her notebook, the version she’d painstakingly put into Planner (the one that auto populated her calendar with tasks which she’d had to turn off as it served up daily, angry notifications of shame at her unfulfilled aspirations), and the shortened, priority list she had condensed to a post-it. That last one had been stuck to the bottom of her monitor but kept falling off. She wondered if it would be acceptable to list the following risks as matters of critical concern in the workshop: hitting 38 alone, drinking brandy midweek as she had promised herself she wouldn’t drink wine every night, having a panic attack in the car park at work if someone had taken her usual place, crying to Knowing Me, Knowing You by Abba when it came on in Tesco’s, having an old man take her elbow and assure her that it would be okay, that a lovely young lady like her shouldn’t cry, and that he was sure any man would be lucky to have her, in Tesco’s shortly after crying to Abba. The main risk she needed to flag was the risk of having done none of the preparation for the meeting, completed none of her actions, and her failure to respond to any of the increasingly urgent emails from audit requesting immediate acknowledgement and evidence of remedial actions. The time was now 4am. Maybe two solid hours on Chat-GPT would sort it all out. Give her enough, at least, to busk it through another day.

She let the phone screen dim and stared out of the glass doors overlooking her garden. When the moon was fuller she would sometimes find calm in watching tree branches turn a shadow play across its surface. Or she would try to imagine being up there, listening to her own breathing inside a space helmet, staring back down at the blue globe orbiting the sun. Blue was not her colour. Maybe this was not her home. It was dark tonight though. No moon.

She prodded the phone back to life. Texted Penny back. I’ll be in. As it’s you. Buy me a cwoffee.