After bedtime.

And then the peaceful, still silence turned into a suspicious, suffocating silence. One that breeds silent rage and shrewd doubts. While seated in the same position, all the emotion that had been stuffed away over the past few hours poured from her chest to the floor as her brow slowly tightened with the familiar stress lines that were above and beyond her anxiety medication's job description to control.
She surveyed her life with cold eyes and wondered what she should chose to see in the constellation of her life. Was she the seated queen? the loving mother? or was she the vain maiden? or worse, the betrayer? And in the midst of her genuine angst in figuring which story was the right one to tell herself so she could muster the courage to get out of bed the following morning, she admitted to herself grudgingly what the constellation really was: a web of unrelated spheres of burning plasma and light in an unimaginably vast, cold and dark universe. Nothing more, nothing less. They had less in common than the categories from the Jeopardy episode she watched on the DVR tonight. They just were - where they always were, doing what they always do. They told no story. They told no lies.
It was usually in these moments that she knew she was obfuscating the truth she intuited long ago. The one she knew was inevitable. The one she hoped wasn't true. The stories and the visions of patterns in the night sky were a way to bury the only outcome with others that were more hopeful, more sing-songy, more palatable.
She curled her toes a few times trying to resist sitting with this truth. A few tears managed to leak through before she rose to pack the lunches for the next day. And switch over the laundry, and lock the back door. She turned out the dreary kitchen light and stared through the pass through at the string lights around the porch. They twinkled knowingly back at her. She crawled slowly into her purple sheeted bed comfortable in her voluntary self delusion, and praying that she didn't really know what her future held.