This is El Dorado Hills at 3:30 in the morning. This for me has been what you might call a "routine day": waking up at eleven o'clock in the morning and lying down ever since. I had the impression that I might have had a little more energy today and less dizzy spells.

A few more frogs can be heard tonight. Again I am the only one awake, and the past four hours have been mostly silent. Then I turn the TV or radio on again. The silence is too hard to bear. One can surround themselves during the day with light and television, and then there comes this silence at night so heavy it can be felt. That silence is bad. Too much time to think is bad. It gives you a chance to feel things.

I have been staring at the stars tonight. There is no moon, and the stars over the lake are bright. It's a quiet suburb where men and women and children are catching up on their sleep. The effects of this disease are so drastic that putting things into words is not easy. Often those of us with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome spend hours traveling to doctors, thinking of how it's changed us, and talking to each other on-line, and then more hours wondering what we should tell you to make you understand.

We've told you of the tiredness, the dizzy spells, the loss of stamina, the loss of physical and mental ability, and the plight of others like ourselves. We've read you the records and the printouts and tried to give you a fair estimation of how we feel. But the effects of having this disease are very personal. The little things, on a day to day basis, are in themselves miniscule, but they somehow get to you and will form the memories that will remain when you're what most would call "better."

That's what I want to talk to you about for the last few minutes. For many of these impressions it is necessary to reach back only through the past few months. I couldn't even carve a pumpkin for Halloween last October. One night I sat in our hot tub and heard a dripping. It was the only sound around. Tears from my eyes were falling from some pain I can no longer remember.

Having a barely overlapping schedule to my parents', and sleeping wherever twenty hours a day, still produces a strange and lonely feeling, but I'm getting used to that. Today I went to take a shower. I couldn't stand for more than two minutes to wash my hair. My muscles were too limp and unwilling. I decided to go on-line. I couldn't sit up at the computer so I borrowed my mom's laptop. My new Canadian friend was there. "Someday," he said, "they will find a cure and we'll be better, but I can't even run a hundred feet since being like this."

My mom was now home and came to me so that I could talk to her. I told her I was scared. She said, "I know it's tough but you needn't be scared." But I said, "What if I don't get better? There are people who never recover." And she replied, "Of course you'll get better. The doctors keep saying you'll eventually get better, they just don't have a clue when."