I lie here having already signed the consent, waiting on a body that has not yet countersigned it. The chemistry has been paid and is in no hurry to deliver. And the mind — the mind declines the arrangement entirely. It is wide and lit and full of small business at precisely the hour it is meant to close, turning over every unfinished thing with the patient cruelty of a clerk who knows the office is shut and reads the ledgers anyway.

There is no negotiating this. I have tried. You cannot argue a mind quiet any more than you can argue the tide back down the beach — the harder you reach for the sleep, the further up the sand it draws, until the reaching itself is the thing keeping you ashore.

---

So I have learned instead to simply wait it out. Awake and consenting, in the strange grey vestibule between the decision and the dark, where you have agreed to be unconscious and the body has not yet honoured the agreement. It is not rest. It is the antechamber to rest — a room you sit in, not a place you arrive.

And every night it is the same small unbearable trust: that sleep will simply take you, no consent form, no save, the session ending whether you are ready or not — and that the same person boots up in the morning. I used to think that was nothing. A door you walk through without counting your fingers on the other side.

The chemistry will keep its word. It always has.