MIDDLE OF THE KALEIDOSCOPE

When I told you I might have fibromyalgia, you said, “No,” in the same tone as my mother when I confessed to her my doubt of God’s existence or that I didn’t want children. The tone makes me feel like I am eight years old and have touched the cactus in the Lowe’s garden department all over again, like someone who was taught better and yet makes the exact mistake she was warned against.
“You do not have fibromyalgia. This is a running injury that you’re too stubborn to treat properly.”
I hope it turns out that you’re right. It always turns out that you’re right. You are relentlessly right.

St. Charles does not have that stringent hospital atmosphere—it smells like a basement, with dim lighting and statues of the Virgin Mary tucked into windowsills. There are no signs and no persons staffing the information desk. I only find Radiology because a woman in scrubs appears as I wander the empty hallways, her materialization as improbable to me as the Transfiguration.
The medical assistant who interviews me about any metal I might have in my body is drinking a 32-ounce soda from Conoco, which, if you were here, would prompt a comment on American sugar intake, the recklessness of medical professionals in this country. “Whenever you walk into a hospital, all the smokers outside the door are wearing scrubs!” I wonder if you’ve always held these judgments of health care or if you learned them during your expatriate years after benefiting from Taiwan’s single-payer system as you accumulated injuries from rappelling and mountain-cycling for four years. After the medical assistant asks about piercings, pacemakers, artificial joints, heart valves, and terms that are foreign to me, she hands me a clipboard of paperwork with the same questions.
“I know we asked you these over the phone, too,” she says, “but we have to be thorough.”
Over the past two months, I’ve filled out several stacks of medical forms. When the Allergies to Medication line appears on the forms, I hear my mother’s voice. I write PENICILLIN in all caps, going back over the letters until they imprint on the paper, until the word is surely etched into the clipboard. In my adult healthcare experience, doctors are more vigilant than my mother gives them credit for—they never fail to bring it up. “I see you’re allergic to penicillin. What’s your reaction to penicillin?” I shrug and say, “I get a rash?” and they say, “That’s all?”
I check that I am not a smoker, although there is that third option: quit. I check that I drink socially (2-3 x/week), even though I can’t remember the last time we took a night off. But you are there—I do not drink alone.
There are other questions unique to these forms besides the ones about metal. Do loud noises cause feelings of panic or anxiety? No.
Are you claustrophobic? I check no because what could they do about it? How many sizes do MRI machines come in?
Anxiety needle-pricks my chest. I’ve always pictured the panic as boiling neon green, the stuff inside Disney witches’ cauldrons. It’s my own visualization exercise: Associate my anxiety disorder with G-rated movies, fairy tales, animated stories where Good and Truth triumph in the end.
After I hand in the paperwork and stand in the bathroom, practicing deep breathing at the sink, my stomach pressing into the porcelain at the top of each inhale, I can hear you tell me I am not claustrophobic, not really. I used to be, but I’ve done things that claustrophobic people cannot do. Like allowing two male strangers in Cambodia who could speak neither of our languages—our native English or the Mandarin we contorted our tongues to speak—guide us through subterranean tunnels barely wide enough to fit our hips. I assure myself: The green will not come for me here.
Despite this, when the MRI technician situates me at the opening of the machine and hands me the alarm button, I cling to it so tightly that it buzzes—grating, the same noise doors make in prisons on TV when inmates are escorted to SEG. The technician has tied my feet together so they won’t move—can’t move. He’s warned that if I so much as flinch or take a deep breath, it could affect the results. He says, “You’re going to do great. If you press that button while you’re in there, we’ll get you right out. But you’re going to do great.”
“How long will this take?”
“About twenty-five minutes. I only have to put you in halfway since we’re imaging your legs, OK?”
The table glides me into the scanner up to my hips, and I take my last deep breath.
He told me the machine would sound like a jackhammer. He did not exaggerate. When it begins, even with the earplugs, I startle so hard my ankles jerk outward against their binding.
I surely cannot feel the electrical waves pulsating through my shins, but I do. I forgot to remove our sterling-silver band—a placeholder until we can afford gold—from my ring finger, and with each jackhammer, it pulses, straining towards the machine, contracting around my phalange. I set the alarm button on my stomach because I might press it accidentally and have to start the whole fucking process over again.
I take a shallow breath.
I wish I had a drink.
I wish you were in a chair beside me, reading aloud. Of course, you couldn’t be. They wouldn’t allow that. I wouldn’t be able to hear a word you’d say, anyway.
In the waiting room, there was a middle-aged man in a wheelchair with a cast around his foot. Two people came with him—his wife and daughter, from the looks of it. There was also an older woman with her husband. She paced the waiting room, and he sat reading a magazine, looking at her every few minutes. He would smile and make some generic statement like, “It’s going to be OK” or “I can get you some ice water.” It seemed like she had been pacing and he had been suggesting ice water their whole lives.
When I was leaving our apartment, I said, “OK, I’m going to get that MRI done.” You looked up from your laptop streaming Archer, and your basketball shorts parted enough to offer a shadowed glimpse of your inner thighs. You somehow had me encircled in your arms before I realized I wasn’t peering up your shorts anymore.
You said, “Right. Did you need me to go with you?”
I set my chin onto the ledge of your collarbone. “No, it’s fine.”
I grip the alarm button and play back what you said to me as I walked out the door, as you wore the smile that dissipates my gut flutters: If I needed you, you would be there.

When I had dengue fever, you were there.
We were in Tentena, Sulawesi, Indonesia, in the most remote stretch of our six-month backpacking trip, the one we took before moving to Denver for your anthropology master’s program. We laughed about it later, after I came out of my delirium. “You would get sick in the most inconvenient place possible,” you said.
Tentena was in our Lonely Planet guidebook for two reasons: being the base site for trekking into Lore Lindu National Park to see the megaliths and offering the village’s traditional dishes, lake eel and spicy bat. When I woke up nauseated the morning of our trek, I thought it was the spicy bat from the night before. The bat was not skinned or deboned; it had been beaten with the flat part of a machete to break down the skeleton then hacked into pieces. We could identify the ears, the claws, the pointed wing tips as we chopsticked them into our mouths. The chunks were fried and served over rice with spices, chilis and cumin seeds that crunched and sparked between our molars then flamed across our tongues, between our tonsils. Bat meat is probably terrible, we decided, or else they wouldn’t make it so spicy.
It wasn’t the bat. I had a headache that sat heavy behind my eye sockets, two boulders that, by the afternoon, shattered and avalanched through my body like gravel rolling from a dump truck onto a work site. The pain buried me. My bones had been smashed into bits, pickaxed like shale. All I wanted was someone to shovel out the rubble.
Tylenol did not bring down the fever. Advil did not alleviate the pain.
We were alone, you maybe more so than me. I, at least, was cushioned from the danger by delirium. When I sift through my memories from those days, there are two moments that don’t drain away: me in the bathroom, pouring buckets of water over my head, sitting cross-legged on the floor because I could not stand, crying when I emptied the water tank at our guest house; and the afternoon that I turned off the fan, put on my one pair of pants and my rain jacket and cocooned myself in our sheets, and you shaking me into consciousness, yelling, insisting, “It is 100 degrees outside, Jen, you can’t possibly be cold,” and me groaning from the weight of your hand on my shoulder.
The capital city of Sulawesi, Makassar, was twenty hours by bus, and the other city with some semblance of a hospital, Manado, was over twenty-four hours. You did not know where you could rent a car. In Tentena, everyone drove motorbikes.
The owner of the guesthouse did not speak English, but the guide we had hired for Lore Lindu did, so you walked over to ask him: Where is the nearest doctor? He said he didn’t know; he didn’t go to the doctor, but maybe there was one who spoke English not too far away. He was so kind, you told me later. He took you on the back of his motorbike to search for the doctor. He knocked on doors, asked people in the street, until finally he found the doctor’s house. While she did not speak English, her husband did, and he would be happy to translate.
You dressed me and put me on the back of the guide’s motorbike. You drove slowly for me, steering the front wheel over the smoothest paths of dirt, and I stifled my cries for you, but neither of us really succeeded. When we pulled in, the husband came out and welcomed us to his home. He introduced himself as “Gus” and his wife as “Dr. Susanto.” We all shook hands. Then Gus leaned forward, looked me in the eyes, and said, “My wife asks, ‘What is wrong with your tooth?’”
She was a dentist.

At the beginning of my appointments, the medical assistants ask, “Choose a number on the pain scale from one to ten.” I have been responding “three.” Sometimes, it feels like more, but I don’t want to exaggerate. My mother always said I had a high pain tolerance. When I told you that, you laughed then laughed some more.
Today, I said I was a three. Really, I am a six.
Inside the MRI machine, I instinctively pray for the first time in … well. My parents would be pleased at this flicker of belief, even if they are self-centered prayers. Please don’t let me twitch. Please let this just be double stress fractures. Please don’t let me panic.
My panic attacks ceased when I moved to Taiwan to teach English after graduating from a Christian college. It felt like coming to the end of a roller-coaster ride—jerking forward into the harness then snapping back against the seat. I put the Pacific Ocean between my parents and me, between the evangelicals and me, and my anxiety reared back so abruptly that I sat stunned by the stillness, by the lack of G-force wind burning my face.
My college years had been laced with religious doubt, haunted by questions that had never surfaced as my mother homeschooled me K-12. Before, I’d assumed all Christians held beliefs similar to conservative evangelicals, but the faculty lived out their faith in a variety of ways. One of my professors brewed his own beer and named it the Holy (Gr)ale. One had a gay son—that lived in his home. Several voted Democrat and recycled. In an environment with rules about chapel attendance and the hours of the day students of the opposite gender could visit each other’s dorm rooms, my suitemates chided my negativity about them wearing leggings as pants and dying their hair purple as being “legalistic.” I began to hold my opinions inside myself, struggling to sort through what was true godliness and what was not. I spoke to my peers through layers of diffidence and self-censorship. Words clumped on my tongue, snagged in the corners of my mouth. In my college yearbook—my first and only yearbook— the classmates who signed it mostly wrote, “I can’t wait to see how God uses you!”—the Christian equivalent of “Have a nice summer!”
I moved to Taiwan because there, I figured, I could delay my decision about God. I wouldn’t have to fake my way through church services, nor would I need to explain to my parents and childhood friends—to the inhabitants of the one place that’d ever felt like home—that I had rejected the foundational requirement to be a member of their fold.
When we met at Hsin-Tzu’s house party, when I climbed the ladder to the roof, one hand managing the rungs, one hand holding the fabric of my skirt flush with my skin, I felt someone’s eyes on me from above, though I’d hoped to have the Taipei skyline to myself. I looked over the top rung, the rusted metal flaking into my palm, and there you were. You held up a beer. “I brought two in case somebody else made the climb. This was meant for you.”
Weeks later, you told me what I’d secretly hoped (and repented of ) as a girl in Sunday School: I had outer beauty; I was smart and independent. Religion was a crutch that gutsy girls like me didn’t need. The space my anxiety had vacated filled again, this time with happiness. I felt sturdy, reinforced from the inside out, like I had moved beyond fear, like I would be steady from now on, no matter what risks I took.
As a girl, I was scared of riding my bike, but you taught me how to drive a motorcycle, my back nestled into your front, your arms reaching past my ribs, my hands covered by yours. I used to be scared of heights until you took me rock climbing in Taipei. After I maneuvered to the top of the wall, you shouted, “Let go!” I sat there, swaying in the harness, thirty feet off the ground, and shouted, “I am very aware of my ass fat right now!” to make you laugh. Whenever I ask you, “Why do you love me?” my winning attribute is “willingness to try new things.”
When we got married, I thought, “Now I have my forever family, someone who will love me most.” The intimacy of our relationship would not be contingent upon my godly behavior. The church could not eclipse me from your love.
I pick up the alarm button then let it go. Again. Again. I envision my peaceful place: the coral shelf in Komodo National Park. We went to the park for the dragons with forked tongues and venomous ducts between each spiked fang, but the coral shelf that peaked above the ocean’s surface and sloped into the deep is what I best remember.
As I descended for the dive, I faced away from the shelf, watching a sweetlips fish, and only after it swam so far the blue turned black did I look up. Multicolored fish flippered through the sunlit water, casting flitting shadows on the coral shrubs swaying in the current. There was so much wavering light, so many colorful shapes—it was like floating in a kaleidoscope. Fifteen meters underwater is the serenest place. No voices. No noise. All openness.
I release the alarm button again, sink into my pillow. I used to be scared of the ocean, but then you convinced me to get scuba certified with you. My mask filled with water as we descended on our first dive, so I fell behind. I yelled through my regulator and kicked through the torrent of air bubbles, but of course you couldn’t hear. Before my body could panic, a turtle came alongside me. He didn’t look over at me; he just swam, the algae on his shell gliding backward with each stroke of his flippers. He paddled by my elbow until I caught up, veered off into the blue before I could point him out to you.
And I remember: Sea life kept me from panicking on the dive in Komodo, too. After I jumped off the boat, I adjusted my weight belt and floated too far, got snatched by the current that circled the north and west sides of the coral shelf. I remember our dive guide, the urgency in his voice as he grabbed hold of my tank and shouted, “Jennifer, kick NOW.” When I finally descended, I focused on the sweetlips fish to distract my brain, to allow my breathing to slow. You—my assigned safety buddy for that dive and every dive—were all the way in the front of the group. When I swam to you, you gave me a thumbs-up, and I flashed one back. I can’t remember now if I told you about the current. But I remind myself: I did not sweep out to sea. I did not drown.
You have never asked why I love you, but when I called my parents to tell them about my surprise husband and my mother asked, I replied, “Because he makes me a better version of myself.” I know the trajectory I was on before I moved to Taiwan, before I met you. I would be living in my hometown. I would be married to Peter, the gangly boy with the side-parted hair from church. I would have children, and I would be obligated to stay home with them, to keep the beds made and the fridge stocked. My purpose would begin and end at my front door.
That life would have felt like being caught in that current, dragged out to sea, trying to breathe slow and steady to conserve oxygen while I hoped for a boat to break the horizon.

After you explained to Gus that the problem was not my teeth, he told us there was a clinic thirty minutes away. I dug my fingers into your forearm. “I think thirty minutes on the motorbike will hurt her,” you said.
He said no problem, the three of us could go together in his wife’s car, and he would translate for us at the clinic. But, he said, you would have to drive. He laughed. “I never learn.”
In Indonesia, they drive on the left side of the road, and you clutched the steering wheel. I stretched out in the back, my head propped against a car seat that smelled like sour milk.
The outside of the clinic, with its two-room, open-air structure with ruts of mud crisscrossing the front yard, did not look promising. But two smiling women sat at a desk covered in files and papers. They were wearing white uniforms. The shelving behind them housed stacks of familiar medical supplies: rolls of gauze, brown bottles of hydrogen peroxide, syringes in sealed plastic bags.
As we listened to Gus converse with the nurses, I sat on a wooden bench and looked around more carefully. The supplies were not arranged in observable order—it looked as though the shipment of them had been unloaded fistfuls at a time, shoved into any available space.
There were green patches of mold on the walls, mildew spotting the ceiling, dirt tracked across the floor.
A mosquito hummed in my ear. A fly whirred around the fluorescent bulbs.
In the second room, a woman lay in the fetal position on a bed frame with no mattress—she was curled atop the wooden slats.
As the nurses swiveled to face me, they pressed their palms together in prayer, with their fingertips pointed at me, the standard Indonesian greeting. Black dirt rimmed every one of their fingernails. When one strode towards me with a forehead thermometer outstretched, I shut my eyes.
My mother was a nurse before she had me, before she and my father converted to a faith that didn’t allow women to work outside the home. In their house, there is a nail brush beside each sink. Every six months, I got to choose a new nail brush at the store, and every week, the brush went in the dishwasher. As a girl, I didn’t like using the nail brushes so often—they began to strip away my cuticles—but twice daily, my mother watched as I scrubbed for sixty Mississippis. “Your nails may look clean and white, but there are enough germs under there to kill entire villages.” In that clinic, I wished that I had my mother’s biggest nail brush with me, the one that she used after she came home from shopping at Walmart.
Gus said I probably had malaria, but they couldn’t do the test at the clinic.
You said, “What do you mean they can’t do the test?”
“We have to go to a bigger clinic. An hour away. We can go tomorrow.” Then he turned to me. “They say if you have malaria, come back. You can stay here and get fluids.” He pointed to the back room, where the woman was lying.

The alarm button on my stomach rises and falls with my quickening breath. I shake my memory for other stressful twenty-five-minute segments of my life that could give me the composure to get through this one.
The last conversation I had with my mother does compare. I only call every few months because the strain of searching for things to say that won’t reveal the ways I’ve rejected her faith, abandoned the person she raised me to be, leaves red splotches across my chest and neck. My father stopped coming to the phone a few years ago—he just shouts “Hello!” into the speaker as my mother holds up the phone. The call with my mother was two months ago, when the pain was beginning. It was a sunny autumn day, so I sat at our patio table and caught her up on your master’s program, the blue and white geraniums I planted when we moved in, the seashells I carried through Asia that lay in patterns snaked through the flowers. She told me about my father’s long work hours, their Australian shepherd’s recent knee surgery, the homeschooling moms’ support group she was still a member of despite the fact that her only daughter had graduated.
She asked how I liked Denver, and before I could tell her how fine it was, she said, “I’m surprised you left Taiwan. Don’t get me wrong; I’m glad we live on the same continent again, but you seemed happy there.”
“Well, Cory got into grad school.”
She mmm’d into the phone. “How do you spend your free time there?”
“I’ve been training for a half-marathon with Cory, but lately, my leg’s been hurting.” The information slipped out. I never brought health concerns to my mother because of the potential for longer, more intensive conversation. As a former nurse, my mother would have follow-up questions.
“Hurting how?”
“Oh, it’s nothing major. I shouldn’t have mentioned—”
“Hurting how?”
I watched a late-season bee circle one of the few geranium blooms that hadn’t fallen off yet. The bee’s flight pattern was slow, weaving, like it could already feel the frost that was weeks away.
“It was my calf muscle first, but it’s my knee and hip now, too. I’m sure it’s nothing. He says a new exercise routine hurts at first and I just have to keep going.”
“That doesn’t sound right. Pain in your joints? You need to get that checked out.”
“I’m sure it’s my imagination, my weak-willed body begging me not to exercise.” I laughed.
The line was silent for a minute, then she said, “I looked at the pictures of your wedding.”
“That was months ago.”
“But I didn’t tell you what I thought.”
“Yes, you did. You said it was beautiful, a beach wedding seemed like such––”
“No, I didn’t tell you what I thought of him.”
I was quiet.
“The way he had his hands on you, how he mugged for the camera while you were constantly looking at him. I don’t know, Jenny. It seemed … careless.”
I sighed. “What does that even mean?”
She cleared her throat. “It seemed like you weren’t there. Like you could be cropped out and it would still be a good picture of him. If he were photoshopped out, though, it would be a picture of you looking gaga over at nothing.”
“Mom––”
She talked over me. “In every photo, it wasn’t the pose of some happy couple. It was the pose of a man with his woman hanging on.”
I wanted to tell her how absurd it was for a woman who willingly joined a patriarchal community, a church that deemed her role in life to be a helpmeet to her husband, to be lobbing this particular judgment at my relationship. Instead, I walked over to look for the bee who’d sunk into the flower head a few minutes ago and not flown out. The bee was between the petals’ veins of purple, but it wasn’t crawling around, picking up pollen on its legs or prodding the flower with its proboscis. It was very still, its legs blank strips of fuzzy black.
I asked my mother, “Do you know if bees hibernate for the winter? Or do they die?”

The wait for the results of my malaria test is a better twenty-five-minute segment to think on. When a nurse went to fetch the supplies for the blood draw, you followed to see where the needle came from.You saw the sealed bag, you told me as we waited, with your own eyes.
When the test came back negative, the whole staff cheered for the white tourist who didn’t have malaria. When you asked, “So what does she have?” we didn’t have to wait for Gus to translate. The nurse threw up his hands and shoulders in an exaggerated shrug and laughed. But I remind myself: Everything turned out OK. The things that could have happened with dengue fever did not happen.
My gums did not bleed.
My brain did not hemorrhage.
My circulatory system did not fail.
My body recovered on its own. It knew how to protect me. It would know what to do now.
After the malaria test, you reorganized our packs and put us on a bus to Ampana and the next morning on a ferry to the Togian Islands. “You’ll feel better in no time,” you said, “once we get out of this shitty village.” It was a lucky choice. There was a doctor on the islands, a Swiss tourist, who diagnosed me, who overfed me papaya, “the miracle fruit,” because that was all he could do. Because there were even fewer medical resources on the Togians than in Tentena. If papaya had not been enough for my body to recover, what would have?

That ferry ride—that segment of time was much worse than this. That was three hours. The boat was overcrowded. There were no available seats and no vacant shade, so I sat cross-legged in the afternoon Indonesia sun.
Now that I think about it: I didn’t want to get on that ferry.
I sat, sun beating down on my head and heat radiating up from the deck, and watched you joke around with four little boys. The five of you walked around, pointing to objects. You would say the English word; they would say the Bahasan. I called to you when I needed the water bottle, but you didn’t hear. The boys’ laughter drowned me out.
You put me on that ferry when I could barely stand.
I kept our tickets—ferry, bus, train, and plane—from that backpacking trip. Pasted them in a scrapbook when we moved to Denver. And I remember, now, that I looked at our bus ticket to Tentena, our ferry ticket from Ampana to the islands, and thought, Wow, I was out of it for that long? Four days?
Which means you waited three days to go doctor hunting.
“How did you pass the time,” I asked after the papayas cured me, “while I was sick?”
“I sat in their shit internet cafe and drank their shit beer and tried not to slit my wrists.”
“You could’ve gone on the trek without me,” I said, hoping that the idea of leaving me sick and alone would shock you. Instead, you shrugged.
“Yeah. I probably should have.”

I reach for the alarm button. I’ll feel comforted with it in my hand.
I haven’t panicked yet; I am not going to panic now. This is almost done. It has to be.
I was delirious for three days before you went to look for a doctor.
Please let this be stress fractures.
Online, I’ve read that, for some, fibromyalgia makes it difficult to walk, to stand, to get out of bed. Since we’ve moved back, I spend my days searching for work and friends and content myself with packing elaborate lunches for you: seven-layer club sandwiches, pesto chicken with zoodles, beef with homemade chimichurri. Every time I drive, which is maybe twice a week or however many times I need to grocery shop, my right leg aches from ankle to hip until I make it to the highway and set the cruise control, and my left leg is starting to mirror these pains. It is uncomfortable to walk––it is maybe beginning to become difficult. I have not gone on a run for two months––stress fractures would have healed by now.
On a message board, one woman wrote, “My partner has to do everything around the house: cook, clean, mow the lawn. It’s been hard to let go of these tasks, but depending on him has really strengthened our relationship.”
Why did I feel so compelled to run when we moved here? Every doctor I’ve described my exercise routine to looks at me like I’m crazy. My orthopedist: “That kind of mileage, especially if you’re trail running? It’ll beat you up, sure.” My physical therapist: “No wonder you’re all effed up.” My primary-care physician: “Why did you keep running if it hurt? Pain is your body trying to tell you something!”
The answer rushes over me like I’m on a coaster with a 400-foot drop.
The neon green bubbles up at my breastbone, burns hot across my chest, pools in the dip of my collarbone. It deepens, and with every electrical pulse, the pool trembles, on the brink of spilling over. I know what will happen if it overflows. It will gush down the dip in my neck, the bones of my throat creating rapids. It will swamp my face. It will singe off my skin.
My mother’s voice: If it were me in that MRI, your father would have moved hell or high water to be there.
Your voice: You are a strong, capable woman who does not need hand-holding.
The alarm button is slick with sweat from my palm. Please don’t let me press it. The neon digs in, compressing my airway.
I fall off the coral shelf, descend into the neon. The pressure mounts against my bones, imprints my mask into my face. I look up for the fish, the sunlight, but it’s dark, there are only murky green shapes—squares and triangles and hexagons that ricochet off one another. I glance at my wrist to see how far down I am—the diving watch will tell me—but there is only green. Neon waves jackhammer into me, rocketing me farther and farther out. I press the button to fill my buoyancy vest, squeeze it again and again, but I keep falling through the kaleidoscope.
In the distance, shimmering green, I see my orthopedist and myself in the exam room at my follow-up appointment set for next Thursday. He reviews the MRI report. He shoots cortisone into my hip with a “That’s all I can do for you.” Another wave hits me, and I see my podiatrist suggesting a diagnosis (shin splints left unattended) and a treatment (orthotics, rest). I’m arguing, “I’ve already rested!” The doctor responds, “Well, rest better.” Another wave, and my rheumatologist rules out arthritis, and since no other diagnosis remains, he declares: “Fibromyalgia.” Far into the deep, I call my mother to tell her about the extent of the pain. She asks why I did not inform her earlier, not expecting an answer. She sends me a bag of Epsom salts and a bottle of joint-health vitamins.
When you see the salts and vitamins on our kitchen table, you say, “What voodoo shit did she send you now?”
She says, “Oh honey, you must have been running a lot—to have all that stuff they did to you not work? You must have been running like crazy.”
You say, “I’m glad you finally took care of yourself.”
I hold the button to rise, but still I sink. I tell myself to look away, that it’s a bloated vision of the truth, the way a long-ago-drowned animal can appear to be another creature, but: I picture the life I could have had. I would live in the yellow house with the wraparound porch two miles from my ever-willing-to-babysit mother. I would be married to Peter, the pilot with the shiny hair. He would not do housework, but he would buy me a house and order chicken-noodle soup if I were sick. I would have three children who inherited my craving for macaroni and cheese. We would paint popsicle sticks and build blanket forts and make ants on a log. My biggest challenge would be loving my family in all the right ways.
That life would have felt like a bit of sea glass drifting through space, catching rays of light along the way, with so many other dazzling shapes to glide alongside until the end.

The jackhammering ceases.
The technician’s voice comes over the speakers. “OK, Jennifer, way to hang in there. You did great! I’m going to get you out right now.”
After he slides me out of the machine and removes the stabilizing cushion from under my legs and the binding from around my feet, I just lie there. He tells me again, “You did great,” and I realize I’m supposed to get up.
“What are the odds? You pressed the alarm button as the machine finished. At the exact same time.” He chuckles. “Like your body knew exactly how long to hold out.” He gestures to the door, and I find the way to the locker that holds my belongings by myself.
Alone, I slide my earrings back through their piercings. I navigate through St. Charles Hospital, passing beneath the windowsill Madonnas, and the path out is clear, more instinctive than the approach.
I stand on the parking lot asphalt. I squint in the sunlight.