Outline

“Morning,” oil on canvas, by George Inness, c. 1878.

I’ve never seen such a beautiful sunrise: blackberry purple fading into sherbet orange and all the other delicious colors in between. It’s a little reminder that I’m still me, that this is the same life that I’ve always been living, that everything will be okay, even after another night clinging to the pillow like it’s an old memory I’m scared to lose.

It’s taken me a few days, but I’m getting used to my new room: walls the color of daffodil petals, a pudgy recliner, a window facing the lawn and the sunrise beyond. My daughter offered to let me move in with her, like I did for my own mom when she was my age, but I know that I’m “going,” and just like the other kind of “going,” I don’t want to feel rushed, with my daughter tapping her foot outside the door, wondering when I’ll finally be done. Instead, I’m taking photos of the things that I can’t forget to tell her about when she visits. The sunrise makes for a perfect first picture. I shake the film dry, check the timestamp, and put it in my dresser.

When I close the drawer, I find a card propped on top, the empty chrysalis of its envelope lying beside it, like it’s been waiting for me to unfold its new wings. Every day is a fresh start, it says over watercolor clouds, and on the inside, but I’ll never forget the ones we’ve shared. It comes with a picture of my daughter, as clean and crisp as if I’d just taken it myself. I leave for breakfast, my camera around my neck, my daughter in my pocket.

The dining room here feels like a school cafeteria: different food-smells dogpiling on top of bleach and black pepper, tables all jostling each other for space, administrators watching from the room’s periphery in case anybody chokes. The only difference is that this place has itchy burgundy banquet chairs instead of hard plastic stools, and there’s nobody shoving pepperoni sticks up their nose. That, and everyone here is old.

I take my tray to my usual table. A nurse with a greasy ponytail rolls an old lady (well, my age, but older in some intangible way) between two chairs across from me. He mashes her wheelchair’s brakes with his shoe and drops a plate onto the table. The old woman keeps staring at the pancakes wobbling on top even after he’s walked away, her purple-orange shawl mounded almost all the way up to her cloud of gray hair.

I tell her, “Good morning!” like I always do.

Her gaze floats up to me. You could fall into those eyes for hours and never reach the bottom. “I’m Victoria,” she says, like she always does.

I show Victoria the card that I found. Usually, it’s hard for me to talk about my daughter, like trying to draw a beautiful painting from memory: I know how seeing her makes me feel, but there are so many important details that I’m always scared I’ll forget one—her cheeks just made for smiling, or the pink streak in her hair that I’ve always felt just a bit jealous of. But with this picture to help, talking about her feels wonderful, and almost effortless.

“Next time she comes visit,” I tell Victoria, “I’ll introduce you to her.”

Victoria stares at the picture like she’s afraid the person in it might vanish if she blinks. “I can’t remember the last time someone came to see me.”

It’s all I can do not to reach across the table, just to hug her, be hugged, clear the gloom from the space between us. “I’ll come to see you,” I say. “Tomorrow morning. For breakfast.”

She blinks, startling a teardrop off her eyelashes. Her red lipstick stretches into a smile. I toast her with my orange juice. It tastes like sunshine.

*

It’s already getting colder, geese wobbling south across the pre-dawn sky, all the bushes and trees changing into their fall colors. But it also makes things cozy, which might be the most scrumptious feeling there is. After breakfast, everyone crowds around the common area’s fireplace to knit or color or stare into space. I sit in the easy chair with the peeling cushions, the community cat on my lap thrumming like a radiator.

Before long, the nurses walk in with someone way too young to live here. They introduce her as our dance instructor, and inform us that we’ll be learning swing dance, and it will be fun, and they won’t hear any arguments about it.

I don’t know anything about swing dance. My body, though, remembers in an instant. The trombones and trumpets slip-‘n’-slide out of the instructor’s portable speaker, and I’m suddenly out of my chair, feet shuffling, hips shimmying, arms whipping around me like long silk ribbons. Nothing exists but this moment, and this moment is a cymbal crash, shimmery and shivering and ecstatic.

One of the nurses snaps a picture. Some whoop and whistle. Even Victoria is clapping (only on the inside, but I can tell by the way her shoulders hang less heavy than usual). Between songs, this handsome man comes and asks me—asks me—if I’d like to dance. I recognize him from where he always sits at breakfast, over at the bar. I’ve spent a lot of time looking over at that bar.

After we’re done, he bows to me from his wheelchair, holds out his hand, and escorts me back to my seat. He leans closer. He smells like pine trees and rainwater. “I’m Bo,” he whispers.

I tell him my name. “Thanks for the dance.”

Bo takes one of the coloring-book markers from the table beside us, writes his room number on the back of my hand, and rolls away with a wink. I giggle. I can’t remember the last time I giggled like that.

Later, after the night nurses have made their rounds, and the last sleepwalker shuffles out of the hallway, I throw my robe over my briefs and compression stockings like it’s a slinky red dress. I open Bo’s door. He turns from the window, head teeter-tottering. “I was wondering when I’d see you again,” he says.

But as I sit in the armchair beside him, his face gets all rubbery with confusion. He doesn’t recognize me—or, he recognized me wrong. He thought I was his wife. It hurts, but it could’ve happened to any of us. I tell him the story about us dancing.

He says that sounds wonderful.

I tell him it was.

He says I’m even more beautiful than his wife was, he thinks.

I tell him he isn’t quite as handsome as my husband was, but he’s close.

He smiles at that, stretchy as strawberry taffy, and asks if I’d like to hold hands.

I say yes, I’d like that a lot.

He lays his head on my shoulder. I rest my hand over his.

We stay like that all the way until sunrise.

*

When I lived alone, all I had to remember was hair appointments each Monday, cooking club once a month, and the endless spin through holidays with cooking shows filling the gaps between. Here, though, we have so many activities that it’s hard to get pictures of them all. We’ve decorated cookies, and painted by number, and even played kazoo (which was more painful and more fun than I would’ve expected). And that’s not counting the nurses challenging people to checkers like it’s their job, or the destitute puzzles scattered across coffee tables, sniffling for someone to help them find their missing pieces.

Even this morning at breakfast, the nurses are handing out flyers. Each has dice and chess pieces printed around the edge, Game Night in the center in film-noir font, a fedora tilted down over the G’s forehead. They’ve set out prize baskets for the winners, too: the best one has socks fuzzier than the community cat, and a coloring book with fresh colored pencils, and even real sodas, which they never let us have here.

“We can team up!” I tell Victoria. I don’t know whether there will be teams, but I want Victoria on mine anyway.

Just then, though, Victoria’s nurse appears out of nowhere. “She’ll have to miss it,” he says, grabbing her wheelchair’s handles. “She’s got a doctor’s appointment. Specialist. Out of town. Going to be someone else’s problem for a few days.”

He leans on Victoria’s wheelchair and slouches out of the dining room, his ponytail a long, dark smear down his back, Victoria’s napkin still spread across her lap. I shuffle over to Bo at the bar and ask whether he’d like to team up instead. He just shakes his head. His head always shakes these days, but this shake has something final in it. I tell Bo that’s okay and give him a little side hug. He shrugs off my arm, coughs, and spits brown mucus into his bib. A splotch of old sweat smell stains his rainwater scent.

Bo hasn’t been himself since he got sick last month. These days, I’m not sure he remembers that night we spent holding hands. The nurses always say we “get worse” with stress or change. I think that’s why they never let anything change here—same breakfast every morning, same gentle jazz in the dining room, same steady warmth no matter what season. What’s harder on us than anything, though, is feeling alone. That’s why I’d wanted to partner up. Game night together would’ve made for such a fun memory. Who knows how many more we’ll have?

*

Victoria is coming back! She’s been gone for what feels like forever, having some appointment that I don’t think either of us really ever understood the purpose of. That’s what her nurse tells me this morning, at least, when I ask him where Victoria is. He makes it sound like he doesn’t really understand the appointment’s purpose either, but for different reasons, which makes me angry, but mostly sad.

I make Victoria a Welcome Home sign during our crafts activity, and wrap a ribbon around one of the sodas I’ve been saving for a special occasion for I don’t know how long, and even find some pancakes-and-syrup jellybeans in the gift shop to make up for all those breakfasts she’s missed. I take everything to one of the lobby chairs, along with the community cat and a coloring book that I found on my nightstand, and wait for Victoria to get here.

It takes longer than I’d expected. So long that the community cat hops off my lap to find something more fun to ignore than me. So long that my nurse brings me a sandwich, then another at dinnertime, and makes me get up and waddle around so the blood in my legs doesn’t get all sticky. So long that the streetlights outside flicker on, and the common-area chandelier flickers off, and the day nurses flicker out to be replaced with the night ones.

And then, finally, just as I’m dozing off with the coloring book all filled in beside me, a van wobbles into the parking lot. It nuzzles into an open spot and shuts its headlights with a tired snuffle, and under the dome light, staring out the windshield with her big whirlpool eyes, is Victoria.

She’s brought a man with her. The wind tugs at his black wool coat as he circles around to the passenger side, unfolds a wheelchair, and lifts Victoria into it like an antique vase. Before he starts pushing her toward the entrance, he snugs her knit beanie over her ears. I love him for that.

The sliding doors open for Victoria like they’ve been waiting their whole lives for this moment. She doesn’t look up when I cheer her name and snap a picture, but the man does. He has a beautiful smile, wide and bright as a rising moon. He bends down and points. “Vickie, they made you a sign.”

Victoria’s head stays tilted sideways, the curve of her neck an open parenthesis.

The man parks her wheelchair by the empty front desk. “She’s had a long day,” he apologizes. “Thanks for the welcome, though. It means a lot knowing she’s well cared for. You a nurse here?”

I giggle and bat his arm. Compared to the nurses here, I look like a popped balloon. “Just Victoria’s friend,” I say. “We do breakfast together every morning, activities in the afternoons. Are you her son?”

His smile wanes to a thin, slivered crescent. “No.” The smile goes dark. “Husband.” We both look down at the wheelchair handle, his bare knuckles wrapped around it. He releases his grip. “Ex.”

Before I can say anything, he turns back to the sliding doors, his coat collar lifted against the cold. Victoria stares at the blanket across her lap, tucked so carefully under her knees.

I didn’t know she’d had a husband. Maybe she doesn’t know it, either. That thought rips me to tiny confetti pieces, the kind left on the floor of a birthday party that nobody came to, after you’ve turned off all the lights, and lain your head down on the table to cry.

I rip my gaze away from parking lot after what feels like just a moment, but Victoria is already gone, the night nurse pushing her into her room down the hall.

*

The clouds cover the sunrise this morning. It still makes me smile, though, knowing the sun is also smiling at the world even when the world just wants to stay under the covers, the way I used to when my mom would flick on the lights before school and sing, goooood mo-rning, good mor-ning, to yoouuu.

I catch a picture of Victoria at our usual table, staring down at the syrup crystallizing around her pancakes, like she’s never been gone at all. “Hey, stranger!” I say. “Remember me?”

Victoria looks up. Confusion bunches in her brow. She wrings her napkin, like this task before her is direly important, an exam that she’s suddenly realizing she hasn’t studied for.

“We’re friends,” I say quickly. “Don’t worry. Someday, I’m sure I’ll be the one who for—”

I clap my teeth shut, but too late. Already, the truth is creeping into my peripheral vision, crawling along on eight hairy, pincered legs.

*

I wake up this morning and don’t know where I am only that it isn’t home or where I should be or anywhere safe, so I try calling my daughter but the phone isn’t like any phone I’ve used before, the numbers are all in the wrong places, I think some are even missing, I can’t find the call button, and the light switch isn’t anywhere not anywhere I’ve felt all the walls and the switch must’ve fallen off like a leprous nose leaving only the curtains like sewn-shut eyelids over the window and the mirror stretching its jaws wide to swallow my reflection whole, so I hide under the covers in the dark and make myself as small as possible and whimper for help, help, help, even though I don’t know if anyone can hear me.

But then the lights flick on. A lady walks in wearing something like pajamas. She helps me up, and sits with me on the edge of the bed, rubbing my back, shushing me, telling me everything will be alright.

Familiarity fills in the room like a coloring sheet. The light switch, right where it’s always been. The buttons on the camera—not phone, camera. And that’s a nurse, and those are scrubs, and this is a bedroom, my bedroom.

I peek out the curtains. It isn’t morning at all. The sky is completely black.

*

Soft, plump snowflakes parachute down to launch their festive siege on the world. Each time one lands, I can almost hear a muted cheer from their friends catching them below. I watch through the dining-room windows, mounding my fluffy scrambled eggs into a scrambledeggman and drawing on a face with ketchup, which I don’t usually like, but makes the scrambledeggman way more cheerful. Victoria’s nurse walks past to stink-eye her uneaten breakfast. He tells us not to forget about the carolers coming today. I tell him we won’t, even though the fact that they’re coming is a total surprise to me. “What’s your favorite carol?” I ask Victoria.

Victoria just keeps watching the pulp blizzarding around in my orange juice. “I don’t know.”

I laugh. A few egg flurries fly from my mouth. “I know! There are just too many good ones! I like ‘White Christmas.’ I hope they sing that one.”

They do sing it, when they come that afternoon. Grade-schoolers can’t really pull off the Bing Crosby warble, but they try, their scarves bunched under their chubby cheeks even with the common area’s fireplace behind them. After they leave, the nurses pass out cookies and ask everyone what we want from Santa. I say that I’m happy just the way that I am, because I have fuzzy socks and the community cat and friends inside and snow outside and my daughter who promised she’d come visit sometime. I hold Victoria’s hand when I say the thing about friends, so she knows I’m talking about her. The nurse sitting beside me squeezes my hand, too, clutching a paper coffee cup to her chest, and it feels like I’ve gotten my Christmas present early.

Bo slouches in his chair, his skinny arms hanging limp on either side of his potbelly. He smells warm and itchy, like old, yellowed armchair stuffing. “What a stupid,” he wheezes. He flaps his jaw bonelessly, staring at the hot chocolate in his lap like the words he’s looking for are drifting, unseen, in its murk. “A stupid. Question. I’m not a. A freaking. Toddler. Just wish I could. Play. In the snow.”

I turn to the nurse beside me. A smile piles up on her cheeks like fresh snowdrifts.

Ten minutes later, Bo and I burst out the front doors, bundled up in our wheelchairs with marshmallow coats and pompom hats, our nurses shivering and smiling and snapping pictures behind us. Bo whoops and lobs snowballs into the darkness—I let snowflakes melt like frosting on my tongue—I hold his shaky hand while he wheezes, “Look. At me! Look at. Me!” His whole world is this wonder, a yard full of untouched snow, no memory that it ever has or ever might melt away.

*

Someone left a note on my bedside table saying we’re having Easter brunch today—they even made it look like my handwriting, so that I’d have to believe it. While I’m waiting, I drink in the full sunrise from my room, letting the light weigh me down into my recliner, massaging knots from my muscles with its rich red rays. The fact that it’s Easter makes the sunrise even more special than usual, even though I’m only religious some days, and on others, I’m just content living.

Everyone comes to brunch at once: residents, nurses, people wearing visitor stickers on their shirts, the community cat weaving between everyone’s ankles under the tables. Victoria gets her usual pancakes; I order scrambled eggs and Jell-O salad, because the beautiful thing about brunch is, there are no rules. The guests talk and laugh, and everyone eats maybe too much, and when “Rockin’ Robin” comes on the overhead speakers, the handsome man who always sits at the bar starts shimmying in his wheelchair, rolling his shoulders and flapping his elbows like he’s swing dancing. I sneak a picture when he’s not looking. He must’ve been a real charmer, back in his day.

The chefs come by, carrying platters thatched with cookies decorated like Easter eggs. The woman sitting across from me stares down at the powder-blue zigzags on hers. “Cookies,” she says, so soft that it sounds like someone talking in their sleep.

“My mom makes the best cookies,” I say. “Sometime, you’ll have to come over and meet—”

But my mom is dead.

The thought hits like a barbed whip: sharp impact, slow drag. Of course my mom is dead. She’s been dead since … a long time ago. Since before I moved here. Even though I’m suddenly not sure how long that’s been, or where here really is, only that I am here, tucked away like leftovers that someone forgot about in their freezer, and always meant to come back for but never did.

*

All these faceless doors look the same and none of them look like mine. The dim hallways keep contorting into infinity loops while I’m not paying attention. I must’ve been lost for days, but the lights overhead never get any darker, or brighter, until finally someone appears and asks if I need help and I say yes please please yes I’m lost and I can’t find my way home, and she smiles, and lifts the camera from my clenched fingers, and turns and points to one of the doors—

—and wham, it transforms into my door even as I’m looking at it, like her finger is a magic wand. I realize that’s where I’m living now: a world of dark magic, of curses that nobody knows how to cure, where imagination and reality bleed together and time gets all leaky. And in that moment of clarity, I realize that this isn’t my room at all: it’s the room of whoever died here before I moved in, and the room of whoever will replace me when I do the same. They’ll thrust open the windows to let out my ghost, sanitize my essence from the recliner, wipe away my memory fogging up the mirror, and just like magic, I’ll vanish.

*

I must not have been sleeping well recently, because I don’t wake up this morning until breakfast. At breakfast. I just open my eyes, and there I am, with my scrambled eggs and orange juice shining before me, and nothing but an empty black dreamspace behind. I guess my nurse must’ve rolled me out in a wheelchair, though I’m not sure how she put me into the wheelchair without waking me up, or lifted me from wheelchair to chair-chair, or slung the camera over my neck and wrapped my fingers around the buttons.

I blink a few times, just getting my bearings. There’s someone sitting beside me. I smile and say, “Good morning…!”

And then I stop. I can’t remember her name. Veronica? Victoria? Belinda? Brianna? Susanna? Sasha? Tasha? Tera? Vera? Veronica?

“I’m so sorry,” I say. I make it most of the way to a laugh, in the way that a stunt rider might make it most of the way to their landing ramp. “I forgot your name!”

But the lady across from me doesn’t seem to know, either. She shrugs deeper into her shawl, staring at her plate with wide, startled eyes. I start breathing faster, faster than I can control.

That’s when the syrup smell hits me. Her name, Victoria’s name, snaps into place, and it feels like waking up for the first time in months, like opening the curtains after a thunderstorm and getting a faceful of fresh sunshine. “Victoria!” I say.

Victoria blinks up at me, like her name is a language that she doesn’t understand, and my face is a puzzle missing too many pieces.

*

One of the nurses has brought me cake! For breakfast! I spend forever trying to turn on my camera, until the nurse points out the big fat button screaming ON/OFF in my face. I can’t remember her name, but I’d know her face anywhere, the cheeks rounding out her smile, the pink streak in her hair. She sits with me in the dining room, passing out cake slices, to me, the lady with the cozy shawl, the old grouch over at the bar. I tell her that she should have some, too, but she only shakes her head and says she’s fine with her coffee. With how tired her eyes look, I’m not sure that it’s helping.

Afterwards, she tells the other nurses that she’ll help me wash up. “I owe her that much,” she says to them.

I lay my hand over hers on my wheelchair’s push handle. “You don’t owe me anything.”

My nurse smiles a little twist of a smile. “That’s just the cake talking.”

Back in my room, she fluffs my hair, freshens up my lipstick, frosts my toothbrush with toothpaste and sprinkles it with water. While I brush, she does a double-take at the calendar, flips the month over to June, and starts checking off boxes. I knew it didn’t feel like February anymore! On the day that must be today, she draws a cake with candles on it, and circles all of that in a heart. I laugh and ask what that’s for.

She takes the toothbrush from my mouth. “Your birthday.” She points up at the streamers fluttering in the air vents’ gentle sigh. “Didn’t you notice your decorations?”

The bathroom tiles tilt beneath me. I’d thought those decorations must’ve always been there. I can’t imagine what the room would look like without them.

“Did anyone come to visit?” I hear myself ask.

The nurse’s smile is a deep shade of melancholy. She wipes the toothpaste off my chin. “Only me.”

My whole face feels numb. I’m not sure who I’d been expecting. I can’t remember why I even asked. “It feels like every day is my birthday,” I say, trying to explain myself, but it’s just as confusing to hear as it is to experience.

But then the nurse chuckles, “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” and I realize what she means and start giggling, too, and before I know it, we’re both laughing so hard that she has to sit down on the recliner beside me, and I lean into her, and she wraps me in a hug, like I myself am the present, and this day is the gift.

*

An overcast sky plasters over the dining-room windows, spattered with silhouettes of flying geese. I spend too long leaning on my walker in the doorway, trying to figure out whether they’re flying south for winter or north for summer, if the windows face the sunrise, and the sun rises in the east, and the geese are flying right to left across the windows. But the thoughts are loose as the last wisps on a cotton-candy cone, and the more I lick at them, the more their ends melt away.

I sit down at the empty table that feels most right, for reasons that I can’t really explain, just like I can’t explain why it also feels, somehow, sort of wrong. The whole dining room seems subdued this morning. Nobody is talking over the weepy piano music coming from the speakers. The chef behind the buffet stares down at the griddle, stacking pancakes like a burial mound. Out in the hallway, a few nurses are carrying cardboard boxes from a room in a somber procession, a shawl trailing along on the carpet behind them.

A nurse with a greasy black ponytail materializes behind the empty chair across from me. I say, “Hi,” even though it’s startling, almost disturbing, how he appeared there in the sliver of darkness between the start and end of a blink.

He grips the seatback like he’s afraid it might run off. “How are,” he asks, then tries again. At some point, he went from behind the chair to in it. “How are you holding up?”

It’s a strange way to say hello. Then again, his eyes are all red and puffy, like maybe he didn’t slept well last night, or hasn’t in a while. “Okay, I guess,” I say. “Is something wrong?”

He disappears as quickly as he arrived. I feel like he might’ve said something, but it’s already gone—like when someone tells you their name, but it slips into the blackness between the cracks in your brain. I stare down at the liquid sunshine in my glass, frame it in my camera’s viewfinder, trying to find what comfort in it I can. A song trickles out of me: goooood mor-ning, good mor-ning, to y—

“Shut up!” yells some grouch in a wheelchair at the bar. “Shut. Up. Sick of hearing that. Same. Same song. Every freaking day.”

But that doesn’t make any sense. I was just making up the song while I went. He must be really confused. They say that happens, with stress, or change. What’s harder on us than anything, though, is feeling alone.

*

Someone keeps playing a sick joke on me, turning on my faucet while I’m asleep until the water floods the room and soaks my fuzzy socks and my camera crashes off the counter like a life raft over a waterfall, and the night nurse has to come turn it off and clean things up, and the whole time she tells me that I must’ve forgotten I’d turned it on but I didn’t I would remember I have to remember I can’t not remember this whole thing has to be some sick joke.

*

I wake up already halfway into a wheelchair. The nurse settles me in with a soft grunt and tucks a blanket around my legs. It’s so early that all the lights are still dimmed in the hallways, and the night nurses are still brewing their mid-shift hot chocolates in the kitchen, and the cat is sound asleep on the front desk when we roll past.

The air outside smells like sleepless summer-vacation nights. It perks me up in an instant. I twist around and look up at the nurse. “Are we sneaking out?”

The nurse just shakes her head, her cheeks weary and slack. “We’re going to a doctor’s appointment. Specialist. Out of town.”

She helps me transfer into her car’s passenger seat, folds up my wheelchair, and tucks it into the back. I can’t remember the last time I went for a night drive. There’s something invigorating about the wide-eyed electric signs, the empty parks and neighborhoods begging to be explored, the hush that turns cities into empty cathedrals. The rear-view mirror captures the whole sunrise, an explosion in slow motion, closer than it appears. I lift the camera around my neck for a picture, but the buttons look all jumbly, so I ask the nurse to take one for me when we stop. What a great memory this will be, I think.

Then the appointment happens.

The hospital staff leads us into a windowless exam room where the fluorescent lights shine mind-wipingly white. They put me through tests, assessments, questionnaires. Some of them are really difficult. Others are so tricky they’re almost mean. It feels like the worst game show ever, no prizes, or music, or fun, just an audience that never applauds for right answers but makes worried faces for every wrong one. The woman who came with me makes that face a lot.

When the doctor finally comes in, he slings himself onto the rolling stool and asks how things have been. I start telling him that things are okay, but whoever this is who came with me interrupts and says, “They told me she’s having more bad nights. More confusion. Nightmares, too.”

The doctor says hm-hm-yes, like he’s trying to be compassionate, and can’t believe how long that takes to do. He starts flinging words over my head, and this stranger beside me starts tossing them back, asking about my mood and my coordination and my thinking and this gibberish of medications, memapezildomentineprimosinprazidone, while I just stare, feeling totally lost even in a room that has only one exit, this body that has none at all.

Then the man in the white coat whirls on me. He asks if I know who I am.

I tell him my name.

He asks if I know where I am.

I struggle until seeing his stethoscope, and I say yes, I’m in a doctor’s office.

He asks if I know what day it is.

I say … well, I say no, actually, just that it’s the day for my doctor’s appointment, because I’ve been so distracted with all the tests and questions and wondering when I’ll ever get out of here that I haven’t really thought about it.

He smirks a little bit at that, and flicks the tip of his pen toward the woman beside me. “Do you know who this is?”

The question slopes down at the end, like he already knows what the answer will be. I stare for longer than is really polite at this woman, her pink streak of hair, her pleading eyes, her cheeks straining to hold up a smile—and finally, something sparks in my head. I clap my hands, because this one I’ve got, this one I do know. “Of course!” I say. “It’s my nurse.”

The nurse’s eyes get all tight. She looks down at her empty coffee cup. The white-coat man scribbles something on his clipboard. I don’t know what I said, only that it was wrong, somehow, and that makes me feel like a leaky black trash bag.

The man slams the head of his pen against his clipboard. “Well. She’s progressing much faster than expected.”

I pull my face back. It’s such a kind compliment, so unexpected, so needed, that a warm weepiness froths up in my chest. Sometimes I feel like I’m not progressing at all, just getting stuck every day on the same word searches, the same puzzles, the same page of the same coloring book.

But he isn’t done talking. He goes on to say things like, “disease processes,” and “prognosis,” and “expectation management.” He tells my nurse about medications, and side effects, and treating, not curing. He says that she’s done everything right, that these things just happen, that what’s important now is keeping me comfortable (even though he’s making me so uncomfortable right now, and very, very scared).

Finally, he asks if there’s anything else he can do for us. My nurse looks wrung-out, like she’s been crying—not that morning specifically, or even that week, but over the course of months and years. I take her hand and try to smile. Her face crumples like a used tissue. “I just want her to be normal again.”

The whole drive back, I don’t say a thing.

*

I cannot sleep I will not sleep if I drop my focus for even a second someone will steal my body and start walking around in my skin and taking pictures with my camera and pretending to be me, the real me, the me who’s been kept asleep and trapped in the dark for decades, but now now now I’m finally awake I can think I do remember I am the real me, and now that I’ve taken my mind back I cannot will not let it go.

*

You learn, as you get older, and sicker, that there are good days and bad days.

Today has not been a good day.

It was looking like it’d be a perfect sunrise this morning: clouds hanging low on the horizon, the trees and grass shivering in a thin sheet of frost. As I put the picture I’d taken into my dresser, though, I found this fossilized Easter cookie, a can of real soda, a coloring book already filled in and all these old pictures arranged underneath. I decided to look through them. I’d never done that before.

It was not a good idea.

A nurse appears in the doorway right before sunrise. She asks how I’m doing. I shake my head, looking down at the timestamped pictures, floating in the chilly horror of seeing someone else’s smile on my own face. “Cold,” I answer.

Suddenly, she’s beside me, snugging a blanket around my legs, her paper coffee cup on the sink behind her. Her hair spills over her face, the pink streak like sunbeams piercing a clouded horizon.

I start to say, “I’ve never seen hair like that before,” but then I wonder how many other times I’ve said that and forgotten and said it again, and if I might’ve already done that just now, and all the words dissolve on my tongue and run back down my throat and choke me up.

She asks if I know who I am, and I say my name, and she asks where I am, and I say I’m with you, and she asks if I know what day it is, and then I get the whole-body shakes because I don’t know what day it is or how long I’ve been here and the more I think about it the more it feels like I’ve only lived this one terrifying day and that day is and will be my forever.

Then the nurse’s arm is around me, and fuzzy socks have swallowed my feet, and there’s a hot chocolate already growing cold in my hands. When did she give it to me? When could she have left to make it? And how is she already at the door again, her back to me, her hand on the light switch? I only blinked once. I swear I only blinked once! Before she can disappear, before I can forget that she was ever here, I shout, “Wait!”

She freezes in the doorway, like she’s heard a voice from an empty room.

“I don’t want to stay here,” I say. Has my voice always sounded so thin? “Not alone.”

Her shoulders sag. She turns around. I fixate on her every step across the linoleum floor, every crease in her shirt when sits on the side of my bed, as if gripping the moment’s details hard enough might keep it from slipping away. She takes my hand. “Do you know why you’re here?”

I know that I should. I know that I did. But remembering feels like trying to catch a shaft of sunlight in my spread-open fingers. “I know I have trouble remembering things. Even though I can’t remember when that started.” And isn’t that ironic. Isn’t that funny. Isn’t that just a god … damned … joke. “I know that this thing I’m living with, it’s like a photo album where someone tampers with every picture you’ve taken. Slowly, to start off. Just blurring the details they think you won’t miss. But before long, you start losing whole pictures, and you try taking more but they keep disappearing even faster, until all you are is nothing more than a sheet, a single picture, a face, an outline. And I know that I’m scared, because whenever I’ve imagined dying, I’ve always imagined it like … like … I don’t know what. Not like this, dying by degeneration, by…”

The nurse takes a deep breath. “Dementia.”

It’s the sound of a crack shooting through a frozen lake underfoot, de-men-tia. It’s the feeling of spiders scurrying up your spine. It’s the shock of moving into a house with a vampire portrait, sleeping with it in your bedroom for years, only to wake up one night and find the frame empty, and realize what you’d thought was a painting is a window that’s now open.

“You once told me,” says the lady beside me, “that it feels like every day is your birthday. Maybe that’s what it’ll be like. It won’t feel like your life ending. It’ll just be beginning. You’ll shut your eyes, and that last image will be your first, all you know, all you’ve ever known, your whole life.”

I force a breath into my chest, still ratcheting tighter. “I hope mine is a sunrise.”

I’m not sure why I say this out loud. My room is empty. The sun hovers well over the horizon. But the phantom imprint of someone’s kiss weighs on my forehead like a cast shadow, its outline soothing, and somehow familiar.

*

My hip is broken.

You’d think I’d remember something like that happening, but I don’t, really. There’s no way to say for certain whether it did hurt or will heal, only is broken, passive voice, present tense, the time frame that’s become my whole life. IVs are jabbed into the backs of my hands. Meals are brought in and taken away. I am flipped from my left side onto my right, so that I’m either facing the windows or my reflection in the mirror over the sink, while the words functional decline are repeated all around me.

This time, I’m left facing the window. The sky sucks up the last drips of colors from the sunset on the other horizon. My tummy growls, buried beneath all the blankets and hip padding, but I also have a feeling that I might’ve already eaten, even though I don’t remember it. The thought makes my tummy snarl and start gnawing on itself, as if that will do anything other than make this a very, very long night.

Someone knocks on the doorway. A lady walks around to the foot of my bed, so that I can barely see her, past my fuzzy socks, if I crank my neck as far as it goes.

She’s crying.

I reach out a hand, and she comes closer and takes it. She keeps saying that she’s sorry, that she never thought something like this would happen, that she should’ve come to see me more often.

I don’t really know whether that’s true or not, but seeing this woman cry fills me with a soul-cracking sadness, releasing some old instinct from deep inside: I rub her back, and hum some wordless song that goes, hmmmmmm hmm-hmmm, hmmm hmm-hmmm, hm hmmmmm.

When her shoulders finally stop bucking, I ask, “What’s wrong?”

“My mom,” she whispers. “She’s…”

She doesn’t have to finish answering. Only three things could make someone sob like that: will die, is dying, has died.

“Tell me about. About her,” I say. “Your mom.”

She shakes her head against my chest. “She has this … this stupid obsession with old cameras,” she begins, “and she spent all year sunburnt because she’d sit on the porch watching sunrises from start to finish, and she used to try so hard to be a part of my life that I always blocked her out of it. And I love her. And I miss her. And I never said that enough.”

I say the only thing that I can. “I’m sure she. She knew. Anyway.”

She sniffs with a sound like torn velvet. I reach for the tissue box on my bedside table, but instead, my hand comes back with a camera. A smile trembles onto the woman’s cheeks. The next thing I know, the camera is lifted in her hand for a picture, my arm lifted to wave, the back of my hand stained purple from forgotten hurts.

*

I’ve started getting meals in bed, this thick honey-adjacent that only tastes sweet by process of elimination, like it’s made by bees wearing ties and short-sleeved collared shirts who’ve only seen flowers in the pictures hanging in their cubicles. The lady feeding me says she made sure to get the orange flavor, but even that only tastes like the pith.

She keeps shoveling one spoonful of nectar after another into my mouth, her bloodshot eyes half-lidded, so she never really has to blink. I twitch my limp hand. She jerks back, as if waking from a half sleep. I swallow, and keep swallowing, until I can say, “Love…”

The woman fumbles for the camera around her neck. But something more than goop gums up my tongue, my mind, the delicate clockwork connecting them both.

“Love,” I try again. “Love you.” Because I do love this stranger, for this simple act of care, and no matter how many times I might’ve forgotten to say it, I can’t imagine it ever not being true.

Then she’s hugging me, and I’m hugging her, each of us a child clinging to its mother.

*

I think today might be my birthday. Flowers around my bed. People crowded between them. A woman holding my hand in hers. She starts to raise a camera, but then looks behind her, pulls open the curtains.

The colors outside take my breath away—the brightness makes my eyes squint, then flutter, then shut.

I’ve never seen such a beautiful sunrise.

E.M. Dasche is the penname of a scientist, medical interpreter, and award-winning writer based in the United States. They published their first novella, a superhero storybook for adults titled Fill, in 2024.