The first morning of half term, Scarlett woke up and did something she hadn’t done in weeks.
Nothing.
Not nothing in the bored, itchy way of the summer holidays. Nothing in a different way - a warm, deliberate, pulling-the-duvet-back-up-and-listening-to-the-rain way.
Pudding found her there at half past nine and climbed up beside her, and they lay together in a comfortable heap while the morning happened outside the window without them.
After a while, Scarlett noticed something.
The grey, flat feeling that had been sitting somewhere behind her eyes for most of the past two weeks - the remnant of the assembly, the wave that had come back - was quieter than it had been.
Not gone. Just quieter.
Like something that had been running very fast had finally been allowed to slow down.
She told Lenny about it that afternoon.
“I didn’t do anything this morning,” she said, slightly as though she was confessing to something.
“How did it feel?” said Lenny.
“Good, actually. My brain felt less noisy.”
“That makes sense,” said Lenny. “Your brain has been working very hard.”
Scarlett considered this. She hadn’t thought of it that way. She’d thought of the past few weeks as mostly ordinary - school, homework, friends, evenings. Not particularly hard.
“It doesn’t feel like I’ve been doing anything especially difficult,” she said.
“Recovering from something is difficult,” said Lenny. “Even when it’s invisible. Even when it looks, from the outside, like you’re just getting on with things. The brain is working hard underneath, processing, settling and trying to make sense of things. That takes energy.”
“So resting actually helps it?”
“Resting is part of how it heals,” said Lenny. “Not a pause from the healing. The healing itself.”
Scarlett looked out at the garden where Pudding was investigating something deeply suspicious near the fence.
“I thought I should be doing something useful with half term,” she said.
“And instead?”
“I had a very good morning doing nothing with Pudding.”
“That,” said Lenny warmly, “sounds extremely useful.”
Scarlett smiled - the first real, uncomplicated smile in a while.
And she went back outside to find out what Pudding had discovered near the fence.
🫶 Dream big dreams.