Glimmers

In the middle of the night the dog toppled off the bed. Her body thunked on the floor, and I sprang out of bed and tried to pick her up. It’s the pain meds she’s on. They make her wobbly and confused. She scrambled away from me and headed toward the stairs, tumbling two or three steps down before I could stop her.

We groped together down the remaining stairs and into the living room where I settled her on the couch. But I could not settle myself on the couch. It was three o’clock in the morning, and I was full-blown awake, heart banging, mind racing, spinning through future fears,

the dog growing older and I’m growing older and what does that mean for both of us, never mind the world and its daily insanity. And what if I couldn’t fall back to sleep? What if the dog broke a bone? What if she lost the ability to climb stairs and we’d have to sleep down here every night for the rest of our lives? The room was dark,

and only a hint of streetlight coming in between the blinds, the glint of grubby snow outside that will never melt. The cold, and the only blanket down here smells like dog. It was three-fifteen. It was three-thirty. I tried my four-count breathing trick but kept losing track of the counts. It was three-forty-five.

It was four o’clock. My anxiety spiral kept spiraling.

I remembered another trick. A thing I just read in a book about anxiety where you list what the author calls glimmers. It’s like triggers, except the opposite. Glimmers are all the things around you that give you a little charge of happiness. I read this and immediately thought it was stupid and would never work. It was four-thirty. I sat up on the couch.

The dog was curled next to me, and I could hear her soft breathing in and out. The dog, I listed. This blanket. It smells like dog, but I love the dog, so that’s okay. My fuzzy socks and how soft they are. That plant over by the window, a gift from my father in-law and how he told me that it will flower one day when I least expect it, and that hasn’t happened yet, but I believe him.

I slid onto my side on the couch, twisting around the dog, and went on with my list. The pile of library books near my head. The other plant by the window that I nurtured from seeds and now it’s so perky and glossy and always stretching toward the light. My orange purse. A cloth napkin I bought at a shop in France that will forever remind me of strolling through Monet’s garden.

Somewhere along the way I fell asleep.

In the morning, I wasn’t as bleary-eyed as I’d feared. The room was bright from sun and the sparkle of all that snow. And wedged up beside me, the snoozing dog. Fine for now, but for now is all we have, and I am grateful for it.