I bring a single suitcase to the clinic. In it I keep sensitivity toothpaste, a sweatshirt with double-stitched lettering, chrysanthemum-scented sunscreen, clothes, a book with embossed lettering, no photographs, and my memory as full and swollen as I can carry. I feel blisteringly saccharine and am sure that everyone can see it. I already know the routine, what all of this will be like. I read it on the website tens of times. In my room there is a single twin bed and a half-shut window. The air snaking through is warm and calcified, rotten teeth. In the heat I feel very aware of the situation of my arm, it being limp and discarded; and aware of the quiet, my age. At twenty I am the youngest person at the clinic. It is spring and the air feels dented and as thin as a blanket. I was technically not supposed to be able to enroll at the clinic until twenty-one, but my payment had already gone through, and at the desk when they tried to send me away I just said I’m sorry I’m sorry I came all the way out here I really don’t know where else I can go, and so they let me in anyway.

Dr. Wolk developed the plan for my two-week stay over email. There are four other women staying at the clinic and they are all over sixty-five. We all have the same itinerary, but Dr. Wolk wrote personalized notes on mine in the PDF file she sent me. I’m sure she did for everyone—for the two hours we’re supposed to spend in isolation, the four hours in the sun, staring out over parking lot blacktop, and then the four hours in the dark. She offers no scientific explanation, but we’ve all heard the miracles she’s brought—cured cancer, mended bones, movement in paralysis. With that, I thought that the clinic would have been nestled between hills, overlooking something beautiful. But it is tucked between a train station and a chain restaurant, the outside air smells like batter and cooking oil, and she is not tranquil, as I’d imagined her, but cool-looking, stern, her face blended like chalk and water.

Moving into my room, she follows behind me and says, “It’s important that you follow the itinerary perfectly.”

I say, “I know.”

She tells me, “It’s the way to make it worth it.”

When I first registered for the clinic, I was full of hate. I had just put in my paperwork to take a break from school. My left arm had stopped working without medical reason a week before. I wore it in a cast. I was an Art History major and a self-professed poet, and I had been writing a lot about the baroque and a lot about Theo. I had never been trying to do anything great. I was aware of that, I wrote Dr. Wolk in my first email. I don’t need to feel better, just fixed.

She replied, Of course.

She lingers in the room as I unpack. I came in right in a transitional time between isolation and light, and so she’ll have me start in the dark. Food is brought to us during these periods, but they hadn’t yet prepared anything for me. In four hours I’ll be herded into a cold room and instructed to focus on my breathing and how the feeling in my hands dulls against the cold, against the blindness.

“It’s all for wellness.” She tells me, “My methods may seem unconventional, unscientific, but they work. You just have to listen to your body.”

My mom used to tell me that sort of thing. The first day of college, when she dropped me off, she clipped the curb and didn’t get out. She gave me boxes of wellness tea and, until I left, mailed me monthly envelopes of coupons for green juices and vinegar shots. My dad had helped me unpack. He waved to her on the curb, and she ignored him, keeping her sunglasses delicately on the bridge of her nose, her new engagement ring slanting crooked against her fingers. When he helped me into my dorm, he lined the books I’d taken from my room in his house against my windowsill, alphabetically, the correct order from memory. He oriented the room through his storytelling, the nice ones, talking about his days at school before he had to leave too. He spoke in whispers and didn’t really look at me, like it would break some rhythm, like it would have to mean something else. I had earned a habit of mumbling from him, of speaking too softly.

“Right,” I say to Dr. Wolk, with a conscious effort to be heard.

At the clinic, I spend the first two days quiet. It’s smaller than I expected. All we have access to, apart from our rooms, is a large outdoor space, fit with space heaters even against the grain of the sun, and a cold, dark room with linoleum floors. The outside smells like sweat, the inside somehow like peppermint and boiling water.

The other women had already become friends, or at least acquaintances, already oriented and familiar with each other’s illnesses, pain. They look at me and flinch at my age, and then smile. I can’t tell if they find me adorable or presumptuous. After the first isolation period I am late, so they are gathered outside before me, in the glaring heat. We sit on folding chairs and inhale the grime of the air and nurse steady diets of ice water and focus on the feeling of the sun on our eyelids. After twenty minutes it feels like pressing down too long, holding a finger on a stovetop. Dr. Wolk told me that it was supposed to feel like that, uncomfortable, that was how you knew the body was shifting. You have to burn something away to reconfigure it. Rat poison. A virus in a computer. I adjust my cast with the arm that works. I try to read my book, but my brain feels too warmed and hollow. I feel some of the women look at me and then look away. I hear one of them talking about their migraines, another on the return of her duodenal cancer, a return of violence in the shortest of three spots in her small intestine. She speaks with her voice clear, unworried. She tells the rest of them that the first time it was a miracle, she came here, and by the end of a ten-day period it was gone, with no technical medical treatment whatsoever. They murmur hopefully, maybe unbelieving. In the sun, I find myself thinking a lot about Theo. And also in the dark. And during the isolation period. Our phones are locked in cabinets under the welcome desk. Outside I stare at the blacktop, the cars lifting off a distant plane. Inside, unseeing, I count my fingertips over and over again to place my body. I have the constant sensation that someone is standing over me, or behind me, and I would not be able to know for sure. The first time I met Theo, he taught me a breathing exercise after I’d sprained my ankle against a piece of crooked earth. It hadn’t hurt that badly; I thought it was funny what he deemed necessary for me to endure it.

“What is it?” one of the women asks me, in the dark. It’s taken them three days. I hear the movement of the others around us. “What’s wrong with you?”

She tells me that they’ve all been eager to ask, but they waited so as not to bother me, in hopes that I would tell them on my own. But they’ve given up apparently, so they ask, our skin warped in the same cold.

I count three fingers and then tell her, them, that I don’t know. I tell them that I woke up one day without feeling in my left arm and there’s nothing technically wrong with it. I did all the tests, but I can’t move it. Talking to them, I feel weak for it, the absence of my knowledge, the feeling of cool mutilation in only my right hand. These women have real issues, ones that those my age rarely have—chronic pains, chronic conditions, cancer. Every word that begins with the letter c has turned soft and difficult to sound out. I know that I cannot rationally understand the weight of any of it, in their capability and understanding. Still, I’ve noticed that they’ve liked when they catch me listening to them, that they’ve started to ask me questions sometimes, so I’ve decided that they probably find me adorable. My favorite of the old women is Magda, followed closely by Heather, who has the duodenal cancer. In the dark of the third day, I catch her eye in a shadow. On the fourth day, in the light, they sit on either side of me.

“He doesn’t believe in any of this.” Magda says holding up a picture of her son. I can barely see it in the glare of the light, my squinted eyes, but she tells me that he’s about my age. “But she’s a doctor, she’s a doctor, so what does he know?”

In my isolation period that morning I wrote out what I would say to Theo over the phone, over voicemail, if I could. It read:

I don’t think any of it was my fault really but I’m sorry anyway. I’m only saying this because a lot of bad happened in that final week, so much so that I will probably forget that whole time, so you can too. And I’m telling you this because you are my best friend, and I don’t know what to do without you. I don’t mean to sound dramatic like that but I’m being honest.

Heather answers Magda before I can, “He’s cute. He’s very handsome.”

I’m trying to put sunscreen on with one hand. It ends up matted under my nails, oily and smeared across the panes of my fingers. A woman pushes a stroller through the parking lot in front of us. She looks at us and then looks away.

In my journal, I finished the imagined voicemail.

I read this play before I left for the clinic, and I want to tell you about it. It's about love and dying and looking for love when it’s there instead of in its absence, because that’s much harder, the play argues I mean, that it’s harder to talk about love when you have it. I can’t remember the title exactly; it has a really melodramatic title but it’s good. In the original production of it the director had all of the dialogue read out loud through text to speech. I think it sounds kind of cool and I think you would hate it but now I’ve been imagining everything in my brain through text to speech. It’s been letting me process things easier.

Then I tried to write something about my dad, a poem maybe, and gave up quickly.

“What do you think?” Heather looks at me, her eyes reading warm and sinewy in the heat.

“About what?”

“Do you believe it?”

“Yes,” I say, unsure of whom I’m trying to convince.

“I think it’s worth the try,” she says plainly. Her face looks calligraphic, a twisted cord, remodeled and correct despite any evidence otherwise. I think to ask her about the first time she was here, the miraculous cancer cure, but I hold my tongue.

I lean back in my chair and look at the blacktop. The warmth is so intense it lingers as tonic. Heat soaked into leather car seats. Dorm room dust, books laid plainly. I stare at my arm, its hanging, and feel a sudden shock of revulsion. I used to get carsick when I was a child. I have a memory of the crown of my head tilted from a car window, fingers curled against the glass. I shut my eyes, Magda is still talking about her son. For a moment, I can’t piece together her words, but I like the sound of her voice, gentle and frilled. I breathe in through my nose, slowly.

After a few minutes, at my quiet, Magda asks me if I have a boyfriend. There’s sweat glistening and fraying inside of my cast, but I don’t feel it. I say, “Yeah,” stupidly, and then, “Actually no, I don’t. He hates me right now, and he was never even my boyfriend,” and then, even more stupidly, “Well, he doesn’t hate me. He can’t hate me right now because of what happened.”

“Your arm?” Heather asks. They both seemed softened by my sudden honesty, treating it as some sort of indulgence.

I don’t answer.

“Life is so long and the world is so small,” Magda says, her voice soft. “He will come back if he’s supposed to. If he’s meant to.”

I flinch and open my eyes. My throat sticks. It makes me want to cry because for some reason having them talk to me about meaningfulness at a health clinic is too much for me to digest. I find myself plainly deliberating what we deserve, what happens to us, and immediately feel cool and ignorant for thinking that I can make any sort of determination on that at all. In the car, when I got sick, my dad pulled over on the side of the highway. He watched me curl over the blacktop, my stomach clumped and my mouth empty, shaped circular and hollow. He looked at me sadly and when he moved to help, I flinched away. He had been lingering too far back into the lanes; a car burned past his heels, and he almost fell. I saw a sort of blind abandon in his eyes and then heard laughter, hilarity and panic against the taste of grime in my mouth. Watching him, I felt outlined, a piece of fruit malleable and without bones. A pumpkin to hack open and carve out, orange filaments and pale seeds. I try not to think about anything as a premonition. I open my eyes to look at Magda and Heather and recognize that I should say something back, but I can’t. I find them so kind in their gentleness, in spite of their pain, that I feel physically unable to feel sorry for myself at all.

At night it’s usually easy to fall asleep, the long hours and the oscillation between hot and cold treats as something medicinal and exhausting. But tonight I can’t. I cradle my limp arm and hear Magda walking down the hallway, coughing. I stare at the opposite wall and curl into a ball and flinch at the memory of my phone going off. I’m thinking of my mom’s voice over the line, curt and informative. I murmured responses, and she begged me—screamed at me—to speak up. In an effort to not think about that, I think about Theo. I remember the name of the play suddenly, so I write it down. I abbreviate it as ILYSMICD. And then I think of the last time I saw him before the phone call. It was the weekend before. He came to my room. I answered the door with my hands shaking. It was embarrassing, all the power he had over me, a movement under my skin. I was thinking about a piece of broken-off driftwood, the door unlatching. He was quiet, he smiled at me, and he didn’t touch me or hug me. He usually only would when we were going to have sex. He had just started dating the girl who was playing the lead in the university’s production of Doubt, and I had just stopped being cold about it. I had told him when I found out, oh, and then I’d said that I liked the movie version of the play a lot, and that Meryl Streep was really good in the role. It was silent even beyond the room. I was wearing his sweatshirt which had stitched lettering and read Wisconsin which was embarrassing, and if I had realized I probably would have changed. He looked at it and didn’t say anything. I had a candle burning; it smelled like cloves and butter and something cheap like restaurant soap. He took off his shoes, as I always made him, and sat on my bed.

“I was looking for my passport,” I told him, on my hands shaking, “I haven’t been able to find my passport.”

Theo ignored that, and he asked, “Are you okay?” I said yes. And then he said, “I can help you find it.”

I looked away. Ever since I had told him all my secrets, when I got like that, he sometimes looked at me like he was afraid of me, and it was making me feel disgusted with him.

“I thought it was in my suitcase, in the front pocket, but it’s not, and I checked my closet too and it’s not there,” I said.

He frowned. When I looked at the curve of his mouth, I found myself thinking about material wealth.

He asked, “Are you going somewhere?”

I said, “No.”

“Then why—”

I felt my hands shake. “I just need it, obviously, I can’t lose something like that.”

The day before my dad had sent me a text. He told me that he loved me and that he was going away for a little bit. He’d bought a plane ticket to Michigan. He was going to stay in his hometown. I’d never been there. I didn’t think he’d been back since I was born. He used to talk about his childhood in murmurs and stony expressions. I looked at Theo and felt like laughing though I couldn’t really place why.

“It’ll be fine,” he told me, reading me immediately. I thought about lurching backwards into traffic, stumbling. “Even if you don’t find it, everything will be fine.”

The next morning it’s hard to wake up. I skip thirty minutes of my isolation time. I go into the sun early, but Dr. Wolk doesn’t seem to notice; she’s nowhere to be found. Magda comes out next, with the half-haunted expression that I usually see on her after the cold, the tips of her fingers as white as linen. I note that she looks more worn from when I met her, that none of this seems to be doing her any good. She manages a smile and sits next to me. She sips water through a straw. I ask her how she is and then she tells me that I look tired. I tell her that I am, that I haven’t been sleeping, even more than usual. She frowns. She tells me that this is a worse day than most. She tells me that she’s had a pelvic floor disorder for more than half of her life. She tells me that as she sips harder through her straw, even though there’s no water left. She tells me that sometimes doing anything is so painful that she swears she would rather be picked apart, conscious, on a surgery table. She tells me that a lot of the times she lets it ruin the things that she loves most. I ask what those things are, and she smiles and doesn’t answer.

“I used to think that I would rather die instead of feeling that way forever but now I can’t believe that was what I was thinking.” Magda tells me, “It is a joy there is still so much time.”

I feel my face flush. I nod and am unable to speak. Ten minutes later I leave and throw up in the bathroom. Everyone watches me go. I feel suddenly ashamed, like someone too young pretending to be old, pretending they can handle something out of their reach. When Dr. Wolk finds me, I blame it on heat exhaustion.

“No,” she tells me. “It’s working.”

That night I try to write another poem about my dad but it doesn't work. In the failure I meditate on the first time he visited me at school. He told me that I looked so different, but he couldn’t place why. We had dinner at an Italian restaurant, and he doused the free bread twice over in olive oil mixed with cracked pepper but didn’t actually eat anything. I had trouble answering half the things he asked me, unsure of where we stood and what he expected me to share and what he wanted to hear. He was looking at me very strangely; I could tell he didn’t know what to do. Sometimes I find it very easy to equate my suffering to my own father’s suffering but with that I don’t know who is blaming who. That doesn’t matter anymore, the blame is obvious now, so none of it works.

At the end of my first week Dr. Wolk comes into my room to wake me up. The first thing I think about, past seeing her face, is the fact that Heather’s stay has ended. She told me last night that she’s leaving a few days early. She’s going to the hospital.

Dr. Wolk says, “Hello.” I don’t answer and I rub sleep out of my eyes. “You’re late for the first block.”

“Sorry.”

Uninvited, Dr. Wolk sits at the edge of my bed. I pull my knees to my chest, my one arm hanging. Dr. Wolk notes that. She reaches for my cast and helps fix it on me.

“Thank you,” I say, unable to look her in the eyes.

“Today will be good,” she tells me, drawn in pale colors, looking at me with a sureness I don’t think I would be able to replicate, or even draw out. It’s alien and skewed, like a dream already half escaped.

I manage, “You think?”

And she answers curtly. “I’m sure of it,” she says, a woman without doubt, or playing one. “I can see it on you."

It’s hot today. I miss Heather leaving. Outside, I barely have the energy to speak. I’m thinking of myself as a carved pumpkin, the violence of a knived-out expression as something telling and intimate, more of an absence of itself than anything else. I listen to Madga and the things she tells me dimly, half aware, trying to feel for the tips of my fingers, the immobile hand. No one sits in the seat to the right of me, where Heather had. When I called my mom and told her what was happening to me with the arm, she just told me to stop, to see if the school insurance will cover any sort of medication. I told her that I was leaving school, I was taking the rest of the semester off, we had just discussed this, and she had cursed and said, right, right, right. And then, I can’t deal with this right now. When I move into the dark it’s hard to avoid thoughts on her, and it’s so quiet that I convince myself that I can hear blood moving. I try to muster up the sound of her voice and find that I can’t. At the noise of movement or coughing or whispers I feel so angry that I want to scream across the room, at nothing and no one.

“Where is she?” I hear one of the women ask, about Heather. “I didn’t know she was leaving so soon.”

The morning after I lost my passport my mom called me. She told me that my dad had died in a single, introductory sentence. Her words were smooth and detached. I asked her if I’d heard correctly, already knowing that I had. I remembered that earlier I had answered his text, apologizing for responding so late. At her quiet I made noises I couldn’t replicate, and she listened silently, bothered, burrowed somewhere I couldn’t unravel.

In the cold room I stop being able to breathe so I get up and leave. Stepping into the hallway the lights are blinding, fluorescent and tart. I count and I make it to my bedroom and I look at my arm and I feel so stupid. I feel so idiotic. It had started to lose feeling an hour after the phone call from my mom. An hour after the news. When it went limp, I called Theo and I told him what happened because really, there was no one else that I could imagine saying anything to. Recently we had been talking a lot about my mom. I tried to pretend that he understood. And he came to me, and I sobbed, and he just looked at me, trying to think up anything to say. I told him that my dad used the gun from his parent’s house. That it was all a choice on his part. I was convinced I should have expected it. I used to think I had a talent for being able to measure his pain, anyone’s. Theo looked very pale, and then I moved towards him, and he kissed me, or I kissed him, I wasn’t sure. I don’t remember doing it, but we did. And then we had sex and with my arm there was no symmetry. With that, and with everything, there was a greater spiritual density, an incline towards the dramatic. I hated him a lot. I was thinking of vomit and breathing and smoke and mirrors and how much I felt that I had loved him only two mornings before. His face had been painful to look at. I was treating a passport card and the loss of it and the fact that he had a girlfriend like some motioning towards reverence, an addictive pain. Now nothing felt like it had. His face was plain and open over my hands. I imagined him covered in foil, his mouth torn open by plasticky rips. He finished, and I was left mourning something and everything all at once. I was left thinking about all that had changed and was gaping, burnt away. I cried again, more. I couldn’t look at him. He kept saying that was wrong of him, he shouldn’t have done that. I loved him again, in the hurt of what he was saying, and then the pain that I couldn’t make feel worthwhile choked that out of me. It was stupid. My vision was swimming. I kept my eyes shut and focused on the smell of burning, of clove, soap.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

I said, “Okay.”

He said, “I really don’t know what to do, I’m so sorry.”

And I didn’t care. I thought of my father dropping me off, glancing to the curb, careful in the tracing of his memory and my bookshelf and the dorm smell, plastic and funnel cake. I looked at my arm, a google search for places to go away stained under my eyelids. I already knew where I was going to end up, playing twenty-one years old. I had already done the paperwork.

The next day I wake up on time. I look bad. In my time alone I try not to think and outside, in the heat, the skin around my eyes writhes, pulled apart and blistered. I press sunscreen over my knee. Magda watches me worriedly but doesn’t seem willing to say anything. I think about telling her about everything, all of it, but a lot of it feels distasteful so I don’t. I’m afraid she will stop finding me so sweet, being so fond of me. I shut my eyes and lean into my knee, inhaling the scent, feeling for the pillowy movement against my ribcage, a rattling.

Magda tells me, watching me scrape my fingernails over my knee, “Almost twenty years ago I thought it was all over.”

I shift to look at her, I watch sunscreen skim down my leg, like butter burning on the edge of a pan. I find that it’s difficult for me to look her in the eye, so I turn away, but I still ask, “Why?” Then, “If you want to say.”

She inclines forward, her head swiveling, a key moving in a lock. She tells me that at forty-five, her pain was so intense that she stopped being able to do much at all. She stopped being able to have sex. It hurt too much in her pelvic floor. She tells me that she missed the power in that, the emotion, being able to make meaning of it. I shut my eyes, I nod, I tell her that I’m sorry. She tells me that he waited a long time, but her husband eventually left her, that she once felt alone every day and now she’s learned not to.

I say I’m sorry again and try to open my eyes, but the sun is too bright, and the sunscreen matted around my eyelashes burns, so I shut them again.

In the next room, I hear her crying, or at least murmuring, soft noises, and it stirs something in me so intense that I think to reach out to her. I think to tell her every secret I have. We’re sitting close to each other, but I can’t see her in detail. When the campus office called me to tell me that they’d found my passport in a classroom, I ignored it. I think of a line in the play when the performer said, I was doing it. I was doing it. I was thinking about love. I hear Magda shift. When she speaks she whispers. I can feel her proximity just from the sound. She tells me she’ll be leaving by the end of the weekend, but she’s murmuring like she’s worried for me, of what any of that will do. My throat sticks. I say that I hope she feels better. Against the black she reaches for my hand, the limp one. Maybe it’s the unseeing that lets me feel contact but I can sense the warmth of her fingers. I can’t move in its lifelessness, but for a moment it feels like enough. In the corner of the room, I can make out the barest outlines of Dr. Wolk’s silhouette. She adjusts, and then she leaves the room.

When I was really little, just once, my dad took me alone to an amusement park. I was terrified of all of it. Not in any adorable way. Everything was dementedly frightening to me, obnoxiously. I imagined the sounds as something prying my teeth apart, the smell of sweat and oil and swollen foods like an instant contagion of my throat, an allergic reaction. At my lunch table at school other kids in my class had been constantly talking about amusement park disasters, unlatched coasters, ripped seatbelts. I would cry over them, and I would go to my dad, and he would tell me over and over again that I didn’t need to be afraid of things like that, I really didn’t.

We went on one small roller coaster, and I held my dad’s hand so hard that I left nail marks on the inside of his palm. He laughed at me as we stumbled off, holding his hand up.

“Look what you did,” he told me, his face burnt at the corners and sculpted so radiant I found it almost artificial.

We ate at a small park restaurant, and he watched my small face move. I compartmentalized the taste of meat and chemicals with the panic in the air around me. It was all so rich and deadened that I remembered it tasting like heat and nothing else.

“I don’t like that we hear screaming,” I told him. “We walk anywhere here and it’s so loud.”

His eyes flickered and I became suddenly aware of how little I could understand him, read his brain, play equals at all. He tried, “Isn’t that almost a relief?”

Leaving the park my dad let me sit on his shoulders. I had broken my wrist on a playground a year before and since that I had become afraid of risks, high jumps, the sound of metal. I figured maybe he had forgotten about that or had taken me here to try to make me get over it, to be better in some way. On his shoulders I felt tall and grand, like I had accomplished a great endeavor. When I broke my wrist he found me before my mom. He cradled it in his hands and tried to make me laugh, stifling my tears. He kept saying that it was okay. He kept saying that I was strong and that made me laugh a little bit, through the tears. Still, I wouldn’t stop crying, childishly indulging in the pain of it as best I could. I knew it was hurting him from the fracture of his face. He began telling me he loved me, he told me that I could never know how much, I could never understand it. In feeling the breaking of my wrist I’d been thinking about the story about the roller coaster, its breaking. I watched my dad hold onto my wrist. I sobbed. I thought of the sound of metal, the park closed for the rest of the day. With his free hand my dad wiped away my tears. He was speaking so quietly it was a miracle I could hear anything.

“I love you so much I would do anything,” he told me. “Anything.”

For a moment I forgot the tragedy. I was at the age where things like that were keeping me up at night, dread born from just the thought of any darkness so bleak and elaborate. I was sure I would never grasp it, not really, but I told him, “I know,” and then again, the air warm and blue, “I know.”