My days are skewing later and later. Work is busy and about to get far busier. I'm working late, getting home later, which means even if I don't sit and rest and relax with my husband and the cats when I get home, we are still eating dinner at 9 or 10 p.m. Our normal schedule is 8, and I can live with that, but 9 just feels too late, and 10, pointless. By the time we finish eating and clean up and perhaps watch some television or listen to music or talk, check in to see what the internerd is doing (or more often for me these days, log in remotely to my work email to sift through the traffic, see if any new emergencies have arisen, see if I can at all predict just what sort of mess I'm going to walk into the next morning), it's late. Too late. Too few hours of fitful sleep between my head hitting the pillow and the drone of the alarm leading me into yet another whirlwind of tasks and demands and "can you hang around a bit longer?" Working through lunches, glued to my seat redirecting phone calls, emails, fingers flying across keys, except for the times I'm sprinting to the scanner, the printer, the fax machine.

I go into the cold damp evenings with fingers frozen and clawlike, cramped from the typing, shoulders hunched and knotted. It's a long commute home, and I find myself closing my eyes to block out everything around me, turning my music up so that it fills up my head, squeezing out the noise and conversation, distracting me from the aches, the pain rising. I squeeze my eyes shut to hold back the tears that have been coming more and more frequently. I'm exhausted, frustrated. I'm beginning to feel like I'm done here, worn down by my job, by this city, but I feel trapped, and I don't know what the answer is.