it's the only ease that comforts me

Augustus hides herself small in the mess of blankets she has shoved behind her couch and tries her best not to move.

Her Sunday has not been going as well as she had hoped it would. They rarely do, it feels like — Sunday's are always hard, and Augustus rarely knows what to do about it. It is the day of the week that should be the easiest, but that often only loops around to becoming the hardest. She does not always know how to make it make sense; it does not feel very fair.

Yesterday had been okay, had been good, even. She had done her grocery shopping first thing like she always does on Saturdays, and it had gone well. She had gotten everything on her list, and not forgotten anything, and had managed to avoid getting so anxious and exhausted that she had to go straight back to bed when she got home, which usually happens quite a lot.

Instead, it had been just a tolerable amount of exhausting that had been easily negated by unexpected excitement. The median on one of the roads she drives on had bloomed a variety of good grasses that hadn't been there the week before, and a perfect spot at a red light meant that Augustus had gotten the opportunity to recognize several different species before she had to drive on. She had come home and — after she'd made herself pause to put all her groceries away — had immediately gone to go through her field guides to double check her mental classifications and then got a lot of good reading and drawing done on the topic during the whole rest of the day.

She had been hopeful that today would be more of the same. Time had gotten away from her yesterday, and so she had been in the middle of a page in her grass journal when she'd realized it was much later than she usually goes to bed, so she had let herself leave the task half-finished with plans to finish it today. It had seemed like the best idea at the time.

Instead, Augustus had woken up later than she'd meant to, and even once she had finally gotten to make herself get out of the bed, she'd just gone to sit at her desk and could not figure out how to make herself do anything at all. She'd just stared at the page, feeling inexplicably exhausted past words, and could not bring herself to even pick up her pen. Her hands felt too clumsy and uncertain to do anything — she'd known without even having to try that she would only mess everything up if she'd tried to finish the sketching or the notes or anything at all.

Eventually, she had at least been able to convince her hands to start flipping through books and pages, trying to find the spark that had made yesterday so exciting, but it would not work. Instead of vibrant and interesting, all of the words and illustrations felt gray and tasteless in her throat, and the more she tried to make everything connect the way she'd wanted it to, the more upset she'd felt herself getting.

A restless glance at the clock told her she should be eating lunch, so she had decided to just give up and put everything away. Except once she'd realized that meant she had to actually start the new task of deciding what to eat, and then going to make it, and then actually eating it, everything had stalled out even worse than it had with her notebooks.

Augustus is supposed to eat on a timed schedule because she very often cannot recognize that she is feeling hungry until several hours after the feeling has already started. Today, though, she had felt so not-hungry that the idea of eating at all had just made her feel sick, so even though she had just gone shopping, she could not think of anything that she could stomach eating. Still, because she is supposed to eat, even when she does not "feel hungry", she had kept trying to come up with something.

At least, until she had realized that the whole process had stressed her out so terribly that at some point, she had begun to cry. A five, she'd thought, pressing the palms of her hands as hard as she could into the flat surface of her desk so that she did not hit herself with them, I am at a five. So then Augustus had stood up and given up on everything entirely.

Hence, the hiding.

Augustus had shoved the couch away from the wall just enough to fit herself behind it, and put on her ear defenders against the hum of the AC unit and the faint noise of her dad watching TV upstairs, and gathered all of her blankets up to tuck them behind the couch and burrow down inside of them just to make herself as small, and quiet, and hidden as she could manage.

A memory of a teacher's voice nags in the back of her head that hiding will not fix anything at all. All of the tasks and problems will still be there, unfinished, whenever she manages to emerge, she knows it. Augustus does her best to shove the annoying insistence away; she knows she isn't fixing anything, but she feels less like she is liable to crumble and meltdown entirely while she is here. The hiding solves nothing, maybe, but at least it helps with that.

So Augustus ignores the voice and does not get up. When the fabric of her flannel shirt begins to catch and pull uncomfortably against the fabric of her blankets, she very briefly moves everything to take the offending shirt off and add it to the side of her little nest, but that is it. The world feels less like it is shaking and suffocating her under here; it feels easier to breathe when she is in the dark like this. At least enough that Augustus is able to stop crying, and just lay there in the quiet instead.

Not all of the feelings go away, though. They are not so sharp as to be hurting her anymore, but she still feels them. Distant and tired and heavy and sad, and not quite sure why. Augustus presses her face into the mound of fabrics and sighs out a very heavy breath. The tears well up again and then fade back into the grayness of it all without spilling over.

A small, crying part of Augustus wants someone to come and help her somehow. The bigger, older parts of her cannot think of anything anyone could do anyway, and knows that there is no point. The wanting feeling does not go away with this logic, however — it just feels sadder. Augustus huffs and rolls over onto her stomach with her arms all folded up underneath herself to let them feel all the pressure and weight she can get. Not quite a hug, but basically good enough.

She agrees with the small feeling in on this: she does not want to have to get up. She does not want to have to get out of the soft and dark of the blankets, does not want to decide what to eat, nor figure out how to make it, nor have to actually eat it. She does not want to have to do it all over again for dinner, nor go take a shower, nor have to go to work tomorrow. Augustus just wants to lay here, warm and quiet, and never have to get up again — just burrow down, and enter diapuse, and not re-emerge until the world decides to be less overwhelming.

That will not happen, of course, because Augustus is a human and not a bug, but at least she can pretend. She burrows down deeper into the blankets and imagines it is dirt, and leans into the heavy and far-away feelings in her body and thinks of the sensation as a lowering metabolism, and then imagines a layer of frost freezing on top of the blankets, and stops thinking of anything at all.

Eventually, she is pushed back into waking up a little when her phone buzzes in her pocket. Augustus fumbles her ear defenders off when she realizes the band has started making the top of her head hurt, and then misses them a little once they are gone. She buries herself back under the blankets to compensate, and then remembers to pull out her phone and blink blearily at the screen. Things don't feel as awful as they had earlier, but she still feels too heavy and sad to want to get up, even if she can actually feel that she is hungry now.

The text is from the Changeling: 'Do you want come to my house today?'

Augustus hums out a mournful sound and hides her face again. Going to the Changeling's house would be nice, it always makes her feel better when she goes, but there are too many steps today. She cannot be sure she can even make herself come out from under the blankets without bursting into overwhelmed tears all over again — there is no hope that she could make it upstairs, and into her car, and then drive safely all the way to its house, and knock on its door, and maybe have to talk to its mom on her way in. Augustus does not think she can do it no matter how much she wants to.

She makes a new whining sound about it, and then unlocks her phone to answer it before Changeling can start to worry. She cannot think of any words in her head at all, let alone find ones that could help explain things, so she switches to the emoji keyboard instead and sends back an '❌' as her answer.

'You okay?,' Changeling writes back.

'❌ 😟,' she replies.

'Can I help?'

Can it? she wonders. Augustus would like it if the answer could be yes, but there are no problems on her plate that it could solve. Changeling cannot convince her brain to let her want to eat, or make tomorrow not come, or at least make tomorrow not be a workday. It cannot get rid of these feelings so that Augustus will not be so weighed down by them.

She is stuck there in that hopeless little loop for a while, and then finally remembers that "helping" does not always have to mean exactly "fixing".

Augustus digs around for the words, and then taps on the Changeling's icon and calls it instead of having to move to text it back. It answers on the second ring with a careful, "Yes?", far enough from the microphone that Augustus can tell it has her on speakerphone.

She does the same while her brain and mouth fight each other to get the words out. "Can you just talk?" she manages softly.

Changeling is quiet a moment. "I read a new book this week," it says finally. There is a heavy thunking sound of the phone being put down somewhere, and then it continues, "It contained an essay about Margery Kempe. She is the woman who began weeping after her conversion, and did not stop until she died decades later. For the first several years, she did this out of contrition for her sins, and then she did a pilgrimage. When she was in Rome, she had a vision of Saint Jerome, where he told her she had been 'blessed' with a 'well of tears', and then in Jerusalem, had a vision of the crucifixion so intense that she says she progressed from 'weeping' to 'roaring."

Its voice is steady as it continues on, and Augustus presses her face into the soft fabrics of her blankets, and listens.

It does not fix anything at all, but it helps.