I lie in the bathtub long after the steam has gone, after the water has learned the language of the room and gone flat and honest. The faucet has stopped speaking. The light hums. The water cools without notice, and I do not flinch. I tell myself I am resting, that this is recovery, that stillness has earned its own vocabulary. My knees rise like small islands. Soap thins into grayish halos, dragging today’s dirt into slow constellations. I watch them drift and feel an affection I do not trust.

Cold creeps in politely at first, touching my ankles, my wrists, the nape of my neck, asking permission I never give. I am too busy rehearsing the effort it would take to leave. Standing feels like a choice with consequences. The air beyond the porcelain edge waits, round and articulate, full of tasks and gravity. In here, the water holds me in a shallow embrace, asks nothing, accepts everything. It is easy to be forgiven by something that has no memory. I become accustomed to the chill the way one becomes accustomed to a disappointing truth. It stops talking about itself. My skin learns to blur its own signals. I think about how comfort can be a form of quiet harm, how the body can negotiate with neglect if it’s offered slowly enough. The bathwater grows tired of being clean. It carries my shed hours, my loosened thoughts, my small refusals to move on. I float among them like evidence.

I don’t like how well I belong here. How the cold doesn’t chase me out, how the dirt doesn’t disgust me, how the stillness doesn’t ask me to improve. I know that staying is a kind of practice. I know that leaving would feel like betrayal—to the water, to myself, to the fragile calm I’ve built from not choosing. Eventually, my fingers wrinkle into maps of time passing, and even then I hesitate. I am learning how easy it is to endure what is wrong when it asks so little.