If Fibromyalgia Were Weather
Good morning from the coast. Here is your local forecast, brought to you by someone who does not need a window to know what is coming.
We open, as we usually do, with the marine layer. It moved in overnight and settled low over everything, the gray that arrives whether you packed for it or not. You will notice it the second you sit up. The world is still there; you just cannot see the edges of it yet. Coffee helps. Coffee does not lift it. Plan your morning around the gray, because the gray is not asking your permission.
Expect fog through the early hours, thick in the head and slow to clear.
This is the cognitive fog, and it does what coastal fog does. It softens the road right in front of you and hides the rest. You will walk into the kitchen with a clear reason and arrive with none. You will hold a word in your hand, feel its shape, and watch it slip back into the gray before you can say it. Drive slow. Keep the to-do list short and written down, because anything not written down is already gone.
Heat dome building by noon. Stay low.
There is no sun in this one, just the weight of it. A heat dome of fatigue parks itself over the whole day and presses down until standing feels like a favor you are doing the room. The couch becomes the only reasonable address. People will tell you to push through. People have never stood under this dome. You wait it out the way you wait out any heat: in the shade, moving as little as the day will allow, sipping water and counting on the dome to ease before dark.
Watch for an inland tide. No shoreline required.
This is the strange one. Pain comes in like a tide, rising slow and certain, except there is no ocean anywhere near you to explain it. It fills the joints and the long muscles, pulls back an inch, then rises again. You did nothing to call it. It does not care. You learn to read the small signs the way a local reads the water, and you move the good plans to the low-tide hours when you can find them.
The Part the Forecast Leaves Out
Here is the catch with this particular weather. Nobody hands me the satellite image the night before. There is no five-day outlook, no friendly graphic with little clouds marching across the week. I wake up, I step outside myself, and I find out what kind of day it is at the same time the day does.
So I keep the blanket within reach and the list short, and I leave a little room in the plans for weather I cannot see coming. Back tomorrow with another forecast. Dress in layers.