That the door is unlocked.

You have, of course, locked it. You remember the precise small click, the brass cool against the meat of your thumb, the way the bolt sat down with that domestic finality. And still — here, now, in the long hour — the door swings open in the theatre behind your eyes. The thief is patient and well-mannered. He has been waiting.

You will get up. You will check. You will lie down. You will get up.

That the email already sent contained a typo only you cannot now see.

The error has the courtesy to remain hidden. It will be discovered in the morning by someone else — a kind person, a generous person — who will think you tired, perhaps, or careless, perhaps, or worse: not the person they thought you were.

The cursor blinks in the sent folder. The folder, as folders do, refuses to open.

That the friend who has not replied is, in some private register, finished with you.

Three days. Four. The unanswered message wears the slow patina of confirmed verdict. You re-read what you sent and find, in its bright bones, the precise sentence that ended things. You did not know, then, that you were saying goodbye.

That the small, regular pain is not small.

It arrives, polite as a tax collector. It departs, considerate as fog. You do not mention it, because to mention it is to summon a longer conversation about scans and waiting rooms and the shape of one's own remaining years. So you carry it like contraband. So it grows, in the dark, where you cannot count it.

What is the difference between vigilance and superstition? Only the outcome, and only in retrospect.

That the bank balance, refreshed, will be lower than the bank balance, remembered.

You hover over the icon. The thumb hesitates. The thumb, like a small superstitious animal, knows that to look is to confirm. So you do not look. So the figure grows, in the dark, by the slow inflation of the unwitnessed.

That the rent, this time, will not be answered.

An envelope under the door, an unopened return-address, the particular dread of the stamped portcullis — these are the modern equivalents of the medieval messenger arriving at dusk. The horse is tired. The seal is intact. You have, somewhere, said the wrong thing to the wrong person.

That the pension, when calculated, was always a fiction.

The table at age seventy-eight has a single chair. The window has a particular, recurring view. The arithmetic, performed on the underside of consciousness for eleven minutes between two and three a.m., produces a figure so cleanly, so devastatingly insufficient, that you almost laugh. You do not laugh. You turn over.

The future, you remember, was always going to be expensive.

That the child, asleep down the hall, has stopped breathing.

You have already gone, twice, to listen at the door. The third time would be excessive. The third time would be a confession. So you lie, instead, in the long calculus of probability and dread, performing the small mathematics by which a parent purchases, with their wakefulness, the breath of someone smaller.

Love, it turns out, is mostly the willingness to be afraid for somebody else.

That the parent, asleep two cities away, has begun the slow withdrawal.

The last call lasted nineteen minutes. There was a hesitation, in the second minute, around a name you both used to know. You did not press. To press is to reveal what you are listening for. So the silence on the line was, briefly, both of you, listening for the same thing, in opposite directions.

That you said, at dinner, the thing.

Not the unkind thing. The unkind thing would be easier to atone for. The other thing — the one that, on its surface, was generous, and which contained, in its underglow, the small, unmistakable signal that you wished to be elsewhere. They heard it. Of course they heard it. You can replay it, in slow motion, at any minute of any night.

That the worry, itself, is the only thing keeping the bad thing from happening.

And here, at the bottom of the catalogue, the small private heresy: that to set down the worry would be to remove the prayer; that to sleep, fully and trustingly, would be to abandon the watch; that you are, in the long and unwitnessed hours, holding up the corner of someone else's universe by the simple, exhausting act of refusing to put it down.

You suspect this is not true. You suspect this is true. You will lie awake, parsing the difference, until the window pales.