I missed my stop again. The #10 bus, going the wrong way down 3rd Avenue, me asleep with my head against the cold window. Third time this week. It’s the double shifts, I suppose. Mrs. Henderson’s agitation escalating after midnight, Mrs. Rodriguez’s sundowning kicking in right as I arrive. Just one more hour, I tell myself, one more hour then home. But home keeps getting further away, literally. I used to be so alert. So sharp. My memory, my attention to detail—it was my professional advantage, my USP, you might say. Even after the divorce, when everything else was… disintegrating. I mean, my former husband’s legal team, they were ruthless. And the friends—oh, the friends. Divided loyalties, I suppose, or maybe just a lack of character in half of them. But I rebuilt. At 50, I enrolled in the nursing assistant program. A new career, a new apartment, all of it. A resilience I didn’t know I possessed. A genuine triumph of the will, considering the existential dread that occasionally, still, creeps in. Now? This fatigue feels different. Not just tired, but… a fundamental *failure of vigilance*. It’s a concept I studied years ago, in a psychology elective. The slow erosion of cognitive function under sustained duress. And there I am, jolting awake on the bus, seeing the lights of Main Street receding into the distance. Just another eight blocks back, not so bad. But the walk back in the cold, after 16 hours of watching the fragile sleep of others, it feels like a penance. A small, sad punishment for a lifetime of trying to be so, so strong.