The Day After

Day 33 – December 26, 2025

The day after Christmas always feels strange. The lights are still up. The decorations are still pretending the moment hasn’t passed. But the energy has shifted in that quiet way the world does when a holiday ends.

Yesterday had a softness to it. Today felt more like the emotional equivalent of standing in a room after a party ended. Everything is still there, but the noise is gone.

Roger woke up this morning convinced something exciting was going to happen again. He trotted into the living room, stared at the tree, looked back at me like, “Alright what’s the plan today?” And honestly, I didn’t have one.

I made coffee. The good kind. The kind where the cup is warm enough that your hands linger around it longer than necessary. For a while I just sat by the window watching the neighborhood do its usual morning choreography. Cars leaving. Someone walking a dog in a ridiculous sweater. A delivery truck doing that slow neighborhood crawl like it’s hunting prey.

Life continuing like nothing extraordinary happened this year. That thought still messes with me sometimes. The world outside looks the same. But internally everything has shifted.

There’s a version of me that existed before all of this. A girl who moved through life with a certain kind of innocence about safety. About trust. About what other human beings were capable of. I miss her.

But I’m also starting to understand something about the woman replacing her. She’s not weaker. She’s sharper. More observant. More deliberate. Less interested in pretending everything is fine when it absolutely isn’t.

Pain has a strange way of burning off the unnecessary parts of a personality. You stop tolerating certain things. You stop shrinking yourself for the comfort of people who never deserved that version of you anyway.

Roger interrupted my philosophical spiral by bringing me a tennis ball like he had just solved emotional recovery entirely.

“Throw this,” he seemed to say. “You’re overthinking again.” He’s probably right.

For a little while this afternoon we just existed. I threw the ball. He chased it like his entire career depended on it. And for a few minutes my brain was quiet. Not healed. Just quiet. Which felt like a gift.

Tonight the apartment feels peaceful in a way that isn’t suspicious or fragile. Just calm. After the year I’ve had, calm feels like a luxury I’m still learning how to accept. There’s something disorienting about peace when you haven’t trusted it in a while.

Not because it isn’t welcome. God, it is. But because part of me still keeps expecting calm to be a trick. Like life is standing just outside the frame waiting to say, “Cute. You really thought you could relax?” Trauma makes even rest feel conditional.

That’s one of the more insulting side effects. The way your body can be in a safe room, on a quiet evening, with a warm drink and a sleeping dog and absolutely no reason to brace, and still some small part of you stays half turned toward the door.

As if peace needs supervision. As if ease can’t be trusted without an alibi. I hate that. And I’m also learning not to hate myself for it.

Because none of this is random. None of this is me being dramatic or broken or unable to “just move on” in the way people love to suggest when they’ve never had their inner world kicked sideways. This is a body trying to protect me with outdated information. A nervous system that learned something terrible and got a little too good at remembering.

Which means maybe healing is not about becoming who I was before. Maybe it’s about teaching the woman I am now that she is allowed to unclench. Allowed to sit by the window. Allowed to drink her coffee slowly. Allowed to let a quiet day be a quiet day without interrogating it like a suspect.

That feels bigger than it sounds. Because for a long time surviving has looked like vigilance. Like endurance. Like dragging myself through the day and calling that strength because it had to be.

But maybe there’s another kind of strength too.

Maybe strength also looks like letting the moment be gentle when it is. Maybe it looks like not flinching away from calm just because chaos has been louder for so long. Maybe it looks like admitting that I want peace, even if I still don’t fully know how to hold it without looking over my shoulder.

That feels true tonight. Not big and dramatic. Just true. And maybe that’s enough. Maybe stillness doesn’t have to prove anything to me before I let it sit down. Maybe I can stop acting like every soft moment needs to earn my trust through a full background check.

That would be nice.

For now I’m just noticing it. This small, steady thing. This little pocket of quiet that didn’t ask anything from me except that I stay long enough to feel it. So I did.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And tonight I let calm touch me without apologizing for how long it took.