Zebra Seeking Spoons

There are days
when hope feels less like a flame
and more like the smoke
left behind after something beautiful
has burned itself out.

The flare stretches on
for so long
that time loses its shape.
Morning bleeds into midnight,
pill bottles crowd the nightstand,
and my body becomes
a weather system
I cannot escape.

Pain settles into my bones
like it has signed a lease there.
Fatigue pulls heavy blankets
over every thought.
Even breathing feels borrowed.
Even existing
feels expensive.

People ask if I’m feeling better yet
with voices full of sunlight,
and I do not know
how to explain
that some storms do not pass quickly,
that sometimes survival
looks nothing like healing.

Hope used to arrive loudly.
Now it comes in fragments
so small
I almost miss them:

the cooling ache after medication finally works,
the warmth of a blanket fresh from the dryer,
a text that says
“I’m still here,”
the rare moment my body unclenches
its fists.

But during the longest flares,
even those glimmers disappear,
and I grieve more than my pain.
I grieve the girl
who trusted tomorrow.
I grieve the version of me
who made plans without fear.

Still—
somewhere beneath the exhaustion,
beneath the anger,
beneath the unbearable weight
of carrying a hurting body every day,
something remains.

Not optimism.
Not certainty.

Just a quiet, trembling instinct
to keep going.

The tiniest pulse saying:

you have survived every flare before this one.
You are still here.
And maybe hope
does not always look like light.

Maybe sometimes
it looks like enduring the dark
long enough
to see another morning.