There was nothing left to hold up.

The house was going, and with it went the entire apparatus of lies I had been maintaining to keep the house feeling like a home it had long ago stopped being.

And into the space where all that effort had lived rushed something I had not felt in years, which was rest — real rest, the rest of a person who has finally set down a thing she had no business carrying, and does not have to pick it back up in the morning.

I did not lose sleep over the house.