Leave the Light On

The gradient of sunlight thinned into twilight outside Dr. Reeves’s third-floor office—August 14, 2025, 7:54 PM. Bruised lilac light made Mira feel both seen and X-rayed, as if evening read her margins out loud.

Mira’s knees touched. Fingers laced tight. Dr. Reeves read from her chart the way people read palms when they’re trying not to be obvious. “You’ve done a lot of work,” he said, as if opening a window. “But complexity is common. ADHD with generalized anxiety. Complex PTSD with depressive episodes. Borderline features that blur into attachment wounds. None of this means you’re broken. It means your nervous system found creative ways to survive.”

“I’ve been a museum of labels since I was a kid,” she said. “Every wing a different diagnosis.”

“I know.” He folded his hands. “This may sound odd from a psychiatrist, but science is a good flashlight—not the sun. It won’t erase every shape in a dark room. Don’t abandon it; just… leave the light on for other ways of knowing too.”

“Other ways of knowing,” she repeated.

“Observation,” he said. “Compassion. The meanings you make. Practices that anchor you.” The vent hummed, a soft breath. “There are nights when textbooks are thin blankets. On those nights, you need something else.”

He looked sorry to say it, as if handing her the night like an assignment.

She thanked him, gathered the DSM paper ghosts, and stepped into the hallway’s pale fluorescence, already craving the honesty of real dark.

Outside, sunset dissolved into rinsed-out blue. Streetlights yawned awake one by one. She cut across the plaza to the bus stop. The noticeboard wore the day’s last light; a garden workday flyer fluttered like a small green flag. At the corner, beneath a flickering beer sign, a vendor had spread books across a folding table: romance paperbacks with sun-faded spines, a half-shelled dictionary, a CHEMISTRY 101 with coffee scars, and—angled like a dare—the Codex.

No title. Only a symbol that shifted when you didn’t look straight at it—interlocking triangles around a circle, the color of amber tea. She reached; the leather warmed under her palm as if the day had left a last glow. The vendor, scarfed in dusk, watched without prying.

“That one’s stubborn,” the woman said. “It likes to choose its reader.”

“I’m not looking for doctrine,” Mira said before she could stop herself. “I’m tired of things that tell me what I am.”

“Maybe it won’t tell you what. Maybe it’ll show you how.” The woman slid a brass bookmark across the table. Etched, almost invisible: leave the light on.

A bus hissed to a stop. Mira climbed aboard with the Codex under her arm. The driver glanced at the book the way people look at old keys: they don’t speak; they remember doors.

At home, she set the Codex on the table, turned on the lamp, and stood in its small circle like a ship deciding on a coast. She boiled water for tea—bubbles blooming and breaking in spirals—and remembered a phrase from physics: latent heat. Energy absorbed without changing temperature; energy stored to change state. Ice to water, water to vapor. Invisible work. Patient. The kettle exhaled. She poured. An earthy, bitter scent rose—a rescue rope of steam and memory.

She opened the Codex.

Muted cream pages. Ink like a dark shimmer that throbbed at the edge of legibility, as if meaning were heat you had to hold long enough to turn into words. The first line wasn’t a commandment but a posture: Observation is fire without violence. Let it warm what’s frozen. Let it melt what is trapped.

She thought of Dr. Reeves: leave the light on. She breathed—five in, hold, seven out—until the room’s edges softened and her body fit itself again.

The first haunting came in the mirror of steam: not a monster, just attention that wouldn’t hold still. Threads jumped like fish. Tea cooled because she forgot it existed. She reached for the phone and forgot it mid-reach. The Trickster Echo, the Codex murmured without words. The world, a strobe; time an unruly river. ADHD by one name. A magician’s sleeve by another.

She watched—no judgment—and noted the micro-pulls: the fridge’s hum, a loose sleeve thread, a distant airplane carving the night—observation as a slow match. See the pull. Name the pull. Don’t lose yourself chasing it.

Steam beaded the window, then beaded again. Condensation. Release of hidden heat. The air gave up its hoard and became water. If worry is vapor, she thought, these droplets prove something in me is letting go. The Sleeper in the Fog—her long-time companion—loved fog for erasing edges, turning what-ifs into weather. Tonight, the fog condenses on glass—a change of state.

The Codex turned its own page.

A memory rose with its own temperature: the 2:16 AM text last winter, worship of a face that could not hold her, the lurch and gorge of attachment like an undertow. The Borderline Siren wasn’t evil; it was the ocean in her body speaking in riptides. “Polarity,” she said, a word from somewhere between Hermes and her therapist. The Siren sang both ways: come close / push away. Warm me / burn me. Maybe the work wasn’t to silence the song but to hear its harmony—to let devotion thaw without flood.

She rubbed a knee scar from a church lot, racing toward laughter not meant for her. The Wounded Child’s breath was winter. That phase change was hardest: ice to water. The latent heat felt like grief. It takes energy simply to allow softness.

The ink crawled. She didn’t need to read to know the next presence. The Architect of Sorrow had built her a chapel—cathedral, sometimes, of low light and heavy air. It taught her to adore ache, to polish despair until it shone like an oyster’s inner shell. Tonight, the Hermetic thing—the one Dr. Reeves might side-eye but not dismiss—came as this: entropy loves neglect; order isn’t control; vitality lives in their play. In thermodynamics, too much dispersal and you can’t hold form; too much rigidity and nothing breathes. In Hermetic terms: Rhythm. Vibration. The pulse between states is life. The Codex braided image into feeling: a glass of water left outside freezes into geometry; warmed in your hands, it returns to movement. Neither is failure—only context.

She moved to the window. The streetlamp was an amber moon caught low. Across the alley, the community garden slept under hoops and burlap, tomatoes clinging to August’s last breath. A neighbor’s radio murmured a love song off-key—the kind people hum while cleaning kitchens, rescuing their own minds. She touched the cool glass. Her fingertip left a brief, clear oval, a tiny absence in the fog.

Her attention snagged on the notebook at the table’s edge—a mine and a mirror. She opened to a dog-eared page, set the Codex beside it, and let her own words do what the Codex asked: warm what’s frozen. Melt what’s trapped.

Suffocating in the Mines of Being

Take away a father.

A fatherless child, deprived of a future shaped by his presence.

A bastard, premature and neurodivergent—a fragile anomaly

dismissed both emotionally and physically throughout childhood.

Dissected by doctors under the guise of care, haunted at every

pivotal milestone, even as adulthood looms.

A traumatic birth, a traumatic upbringing, toxic attachments that

choke every attempt to escape one’s own mind.

Cycles of loss and renewal that erode hope, trusting the wrong

people while being betrayed by those who claimed to care.

Finding myself repeatedly, only to dissolve again in the undertow—

cosmically and karmically intended, shifting from security to scarcity,

from powerless to restless.

Claimed by a chosen family bound by vows of devotion, only to be

abandoned as if I never existed.

Left stranded on the barren shores of solitude, with only fragmented

light and a single, indomitable spirit to guide me.

But who sees me here?

Who takes the time?

Who am I to even matter?

I’m not worthy.

Once hopeful and determined, I watched my aspirations crumble

beneath the weight of circumstance and the artificial collapse of

stability—disregarding my own resilience.

Now, the state of my affairs confirms my once ironic belief: I am

both gifted and cursed.

Alone in a small apartment, held captive by social anxiety that seals

me within these walls, unable to reach a sanctuary of wisdom—

trapped instead in a psychiatric institution of intrusive thoughts that

poison my sense of self with doubt and isolation.

I dare not act on them, for then I might forever remain a failure, or

perhaps, there is a chance to change and evolve—yet who can tell the

difference?

The loneliness swarms like a congested street on a holiday night.

I want to give up after countless cycles of hope and despair—each

attempt to rise only to plunge into the abyss of self-sabotage and

hopelessness.

I’m so sick of it!

So close to a truth that burns with third-degree intensity.

Words, delivered by booming amplifiers of fate, warned that people

suffer for decades, doomed to repeat their mistakes until they meet

their grave because they remain disconnected from their true selves.

That message struck me like divine intervention.

I try; I do my best, yet history shows my best never seems to be

enough.

I’m addicted to my suffering, to the very pain that chains me, and I

need help—rehab, perhaps, to free me from this self-imposed torment.

Every time I set out to change, to improve my well-being, I falter—

falling, failing, and entangled in my own sadomasochistic nature—

wasting the care of those who have ever loved me.

What proof do I have that I might ever be more than a pathetic loser,

even if it takes another forty years?

The uncertainty breeds a suffocating anxiety, making self-love seem

an impossible dream.

I feel broken—flawed, damaged, dysfunctional, hurting, lonely,

afraid, depressed, and hopeless.

The last line hung like a bell after the ringer left. Mira exhaled. The Codex pulsed under her hand—not approval, not verdict, just presence.

“What if none of this is ‘just’ illness?” she asked the air. “What if some of it is waking up wrong? A world hypnotized, and I swallowed their sleep?” She didn’t need the Codex to answer; the shape of it moved through her like a current. A passage she’d underlined in a book on Hermetic psychology brushed her mind: people drift as if asleep, a thousand “I’s” fighting for the throne; freedom starts by noticing the sleep. Not in contempt, but with the steady light of self-remembrance.

She set two cups on the table, one empty. “For the part of me that’s been asleep,” she said, and poured the second cup only steam—an invitation. It looked ridiculous and exactly like ceremony. Treat the unseen with the same respect as a prescription bottle with her name on it.

Her phone buzzed—Toni: you up? She typed: insomnia with a book for company. It captured nothing and everything.

Midnight slid across the floor like a thin tide. The lamp hummed. A siren rose and fell. The Codex opened to a page that hadn’t been there a second ago: a diagram of night as crucible. From sunset to sunrise, fire moves through stages: glow, burn, bank, ash, spark. Leave the light on, not to banish darkness but to see your own hands. Fire of attention, not aggression. The seven principles swam ghostlike—ways to feel the world:

Mentalism, thought tinting the room like a filter. Correspondence, kettle and chest gathering pressure. Vibration, bus and breath and page trembling. Polarity, the Siren’s dual song shares a stem. Rhythm, the mercy that panic crests and falls if you breathe through it. Cause and Effect, small chains: water, rest, compassion, and the hour swings. Gender, not bodies but the creative and receptive—will and surrender—finally talking again.

Hermetics didn’t cancel science; it zoomed out and slid a second map under the first. Psychiatry told her what to watch for and how to protect herself. The Codex showed where to put the lamp so she could see herself do it.

At 1:13 AM, the Trickster Echo yanked the night sideways—threads multiplying, the dopamine skitter lovely and exhausting. She stood, ran cold water, and held her wrists beneath. Temperature persuades. Phase change begins in sensation. The Echo softened—not defeated but included—like a quick child whose hand you hold so they don’t dart into traffic.

At 2:07, the Sleeper in the Fog swelled, corners receding into a misgiving that made ceilings crouch. “You ask me to imagine every catastrophe in advance to prove I deserve to live,” she said, voice a low tether. The fog condensed in her throat; she swallowed; it became a sip of water. Condensation is release, she thought. Let it bead. Let it fall.

At 3:28, the Siren rose, sheets of memory snapping like sails. The impulse to text him I miss you flickered—though she didn’t miss him, only what hope had felt like with his name on it. Rhythm, she remembered. In for five, hold, out for seven. Warm the ice without boil. Love as attention rather than hunger. She wrote on a sticky note: tenderness that doesn’t erase me, and stuck it to the lamp.

At 4:02, the Wounded Child opened a cupboard in her chest and gave her the small, cold shape of a birthday candle never lit. Loneliness went primal. She cupped the candle. “I was eight,” she told the air. “They said imagination was a fault line. I forgive the adults for being afraid. I forgive the kid who hid her own sky.” The candle didn’t light. Her hands warmed. That mattered.

At 4:41, the Architect of Sorrow arrived without drama—simply gravity. The couch tugged. The thought formed: wouldn’t it be easier to drown? She didn’t force herself up. She lowered her attention like an anchor into her belly. Vibration. Rhythm. She listened for the slowest thing—her heart, not the idea of it but its knock on her ribs. “I am not an unsolvable problem,” she said. “I am a system changing state.” The Architect wandered off to find a church with better acoustics.

There were shadows, yes. Also mercies. At 5:09, a neighbor’s baby laughed in sleep—a bright hiccup rolling through the building like a thrown marble. The garden’s soil released a loamy sweetness few notice until night thins and noses are honest. She cracked the window; the scent came in: tomatoes, dill, the humility of dirt.

The Codex’s last page of the night turned with the hush of a door closed without spite. Beneath the living ink, a sentence in her own handwriting she didn’t remember: Spirituality doesn’t need to argue with science. They’re different dialects of the same physics. One measures heat. The other measures how heat becomes meaning. She smiled. If she were on her podcast, she’d phrase it as a question and let the guest do the work. Tonight the guest was the dark, and it had been generous.

Outside, at the edge of the community garden, the adopted rooster—a ridiculous bird with opinions—cleared his throat, half trumpet, half apology. His circadian rhythm split the last seam of night. Dawn approached. Mira laid her palm on the Codex and felt the truth that had followed her all her life: she had spent most of it asleep. If insomnia was the price of awakening, she could pay it without resentment. She could nap later—sleep not escape but rhythm that serves life.

She clicked the lamp off, then—remembering Dr. Reeves’s gentle treason—clicked it back on. Leave the light on. Not to banish night, but to make a room where both could talk.

She washed her mug. Put the empty cup away for the part of her that might join her later. She slid the brass bookmark into the Codex where the ink felt hottest. The window wore a thin seam of pale. Birds workshopped a melody. Somewhere, a bus sighed like an old man settling into a chair. She stood long enough to feel her weight held by the floor.

For the first time in a long while, Mira wasn’t afraid of what came next. (Sunrise August 15, 2025, 6:05 AM)

Together in the Abyss

Beneath the weight of sleepless skies,

where shadows of aircraft cut the quiet

and tremble settles in the marrow—

I hear you.

In the shuddering earth,

the crackling wildfires painting horizons ash-grey,

and the groan of a world gasping for equilibrium,

your voice becomes a hymn of grief and worry,

a prayer carried on winds of uncertainty.

The streets are a map of sorrow,

lined with lives uprooted,

names now faceless,

souls seeking refuge against walls that offer no warmth.

We watch inflation gnaw at dignity,

wars bloom like poisonous flowers—

each petal a headline of despair.

But let me hold your trembling hands with mine.

Let me place my ear against your chest

and find the heartbeat of humanity still drumming,

resilient as roots that split stone to reach light.

Yes, the night stretches long,

a quilt stitched from fear and doubt.

But even in the darkest hours,

a single candle's flame rewrites the narrative

of impenetrable shadows.

We are not untouched by these wounds;

we bleed, we ache, we stagger—together.

In this staggering, we lean into each other,

and in leaning, we find strength.

Here is what I know, not from books but from soul-deep truth:

the world has cracked before,

spilling darkness like a flood—

but never has it failed to bloom anew.

There is no rupture that cannot birth resilience.

You are not alone in your lamentation,

your questions unspoken but heavy.

I carry them with you, as do countless others.

We are a chorus, not silenced by fear

but awakened by it—

a collective cry,

an unyielding march toward the dawn.

Hold fast, beloved wanderer,

through the storms and the stillness.

The earth beneath your feet

still pulses with life,

and somewhere, in the echo of what seems lost,

hope is sharpening its wings,

ready to take flight.