This is, I think, one of the cruelest features of living inside a slow, chronic wrong: you adapt to it.

The body and the mind, faced with a low-grade constant stress that never lifts, do not keep sounding the alarm indefinitely; they habituate, they normalize, they quietly recalibrate what counts as ordinary, until a level of tension that would have alarmed you at the start becomes simply the background texture of your days, unremarkable, unnoticed, the water you swim in.

For two years, I had lived inside a marriage that kept me perpetually braced, always slightly on guard, always managing my husband’s moods and absences and coldness, and I had stopped registering the strain of it the way you stop hearing a refrigerator’s hum.

And then Julian was gone, and the hum stopped, and in the sudden silence I felt, for the first time, the full weight of what I had been carrying, precisely because I had set it down.