Why Are You Still Awake?

June 27, 2026 Quiet WorryAging LoveLate NightsLetting GoSmall Acts It’s 1:47am. You’re sitting at the kitchen table with your laptop open and your phone propped against the coffee mug, and you’re reading about memory foam. Not the kind you sleep on. The kind you’d buy for a dog. You didn’t plan this. You were doing the dishes, or paying a bill, or answering an email, and then you thought about him — the way he stood up slower last night, the way he didn’t follow you to the door this morning, the way he’s been sleeping in the corner of the room instead of the foot of your bed where he used to sleep — and your chest tightened, and you opened a tab, and here you are. This is what you do now. You research things you can’t fix. The first time it happened — the first time you sat up at 2am and tried to solve something you couldn’t name — it was for a person. A parent, maybe. A friend. Someone who called you at the wrong hour, or didn’t call at all. You scrolled through articles about loneliness, about grief, about what to say to someone who is slowly disappearing from their own life. You read every word and then closed the laptop and felt exactly as helpless as before, except now you had a word for it. Now it’s a dog. You tell yourself this is different. It’s practical. He’s getting older, his hips hurt, the floor is hard, a supportive bed is a reasonable accommodation, this is what responsible people do. You say this out loud, sometimes, to the empty kitchen, because the apartment is quiet and someone needs to hear the reasonable version of the story. But that’s not why you’re awake. You’re awake because last Tuesday he didn’t eat breakfast. Not the second breakfast he demands at 10am. The first one, at 6:30, the one he has not missed in eleven years. You stood in the kitchen with his bowl in your hand and called his name and he lifted his head from the rug and looked at you like you were asking him something he didn’t understand, and your stomach dropped. He ate it eventually. Twenty minutes later, after you’d already imagined the worst, after you’d already calculated the cost of the emergency vet on a Sunday, after you’d already pictured the empty spot on t