PruCan - Recover (Nights)

Epilogue

The world was more beautiful, and the nights weren't just bearable, they were incredible. If Gilbert woke up to find me staring out into the sky, he knew that I wasn't thinking that I was too small, too alone in the universe – instead, he would slip to my side, and we would watch the stars together. It was easy to face the world with a best friend who would wrap an arm around you and let you lean on them, rest your head on their shoulder.

It was the greatest relief I had ever experienced, and I knew Gil felt the same. Every day was not perfect, and even some of our nights still turned on us. But recovery did not mean never relapsing. It meant each day we faced bravely, each night we relaxed comfortably, and every setback we took into stride, we no longer let them throw us off course for our plans to heal.

Gil had a little yellow bird, and I had a stuffed polar bear. It had taken convincing, but it was easy to show their value to us, and so we got these small pieces of our past that didn't hurt to think of, and we could hold onto them as we made our strides into the future.

They told us we were close to being discharged at this point. Honestly, so were the rest of our hallmates by this point. The question remained: what to do with our lives?

For Gil and I, it was actually easy. For years, it had just been this apartment as our whole world. Our friends and family – the family we chose, the family worth having – were in these walls. Gil surprised everyone (except me) with a surprising amount of medical knowledge; he had been studying for med school before he had checked himself in here – he was going to finish the courses he had left for his MD, then work in medical bay. And I could never forget the power that talking had had for myself and my best friend: I was going to become a certified psychologist. The funniest part was, we would still be roommates, and we would still be helping people get from inside the program to rehabilitated from its efforts. We would just be on the other side of the tables.

You can't always change what life has done to you; what you were born with, how your hormones end up, what people do to you, or how events mark you and alter you. But you can get help, you can realize when you are struggling, and above everything else, you can breathe again, feel again.

The nights can make you feel alive again. You can recover.