The death of Dianne, my ex-husband’s mother, opened a wound. The service was in California. I wasn’t invited. I didn’t ask if I could be there. Instead, I agonized over whether my daughter should go. She was in the middle of her college semester and travelling to India in a week. My ex-husband and I argued, he bought tickets without consulting me, and I worried it was too stressful for her to make both trips.

I wanted to slide into that Restoration Hardware bedding in your four-poster bed and never leave. My head would’ve sunk into that big pillow as I closed my eyes, waiting for you to crawl in beside me. I possessed a strong desire to have you hold me for twenty-four hours or forever. I’m that young girl again, longing for an emptiness to be filled.

My daughter’s teeth stand in a crooked row. Her two cuspids rise above the rest, turned diagonally like twisted fence posts. The uneven spaces in between her teeth make a crooked grin, but she smiles wide anyway. She laughs with her mouth open, and her blue eyes disappear for that moment as joy swallows up her whole face. Sometimes she talks too loudly, not yet having learned a girl’s acceptable volume, not knowing to hide her enthusiasm.

I felt safe in his arms, and for a long time, I thought that meant something good, something right, something worthy. I felt safe, and that felt important. For almost two decades, no matter what I did, I came home to his arms, and he wrapped them around me, and I felt safe.

Elise is standing in front of her dresser mirror, a tangerine in one hand, a wad of Kleenex tissue in the other. Her dark-eyed reflection stares back at me beneath a fringe of stylish blond-brown bangs. In our fifth-grade class, Elise is a golden goose amid the rest of us awkward ducks, with her pert nose and movie star mole at the corner of her mouth.

The clock in the kitchen screams at me through the quiet. Tick.

I sort my emails because categories make sense. I re-arrange the salt, bananas, and paper towels because I propagate structure. I compose paragraphs in my head because I make the things I need. Tick.

I filled a new Lisa Frank notebook with blank templates of MASH. Mansion, apartment, shack, house; ten kids, twenty, zero, one. I asked my mother to get me a case of Mountain Dew to share. I’d finally been invited to a sleepover with the older girls. I braced myself for something far different from the sleepovers I’d had thus far with my best friend, Courtney.

It took over two years to conceive our first baby. Conception came after miscarriages, fertility drugs, and pregnancy fraught with complications. Doctors advised against having more. They said we must wait at least two years before trying. Given my age, waiting only compounded risks. Having been an only child who longed for companionship, I was determined to have another.

My mom picks me up early from school for my runway gig at the Boynton Beach Mall. I'm twelve. It’s 2001. I attend John Casablanca’s, a modeling school where groups of girls ages five to twenty-five meet once a week. We discuss make-up, runway walks, and other pressing issues in fashion. Today, I have been chosen to model for Wet Seal, a clothing store that markets to wannabe slutty teenagers.

On tiptoes, I stretched to replace the binder in the metal cubby. I was shocked to feel cold, clammy hands on my back, sliding into the waist band of my skirt. I spun around.

It was him again.

“How do you, the jury, find the defendant?” asks the judge after two hours of deliberation.

The room was silent. The only sound was the jurors breathing a sigh of relief as they sat in their chairs. It was all going to be over soon. A tall man with white hair and kind eyes answered the judge.

There is a place

with waxing armpits on video in the kitchen

a room where a man plays computer games

and liked brunettes over blondes

(My mother and your mother were washing the clothes)

The girl stands plucking branches in the wide expanse of the olive grove. Gazing upwards she closes her eyes to the heavens and welcomes the unexpected breeze dancing through her hair. It cools her sweat-drenched brow and the nape of her neck. The girl knows that the wind wants to trick her.

It was early October when I updated my friend Kim about how I’d been spending my very single, mostly alone time in isolation during the coronavirus pandemic. “I’ve taken up watercolors. And also embroidery,” I said one night over FaceTime. Demure lady that she is, she covered her mouth and daintily laughed into her palm, the refined equivalent of a spit take, before regaining her composure.

Once, I had lunch with a really great poet. He said to me that most people think of anxiety the wrong way. They think that it is a rain cloud of what if, what if, what if, a cage of doubt and indecision which holds its sufferers in constant purgatory. They think of anxiety as a door flung wide open, flooding the mind with cumbersome uncertainty. In reality, though, there is nothing uncertain about anxiety. In fact, it is the most extreme form of certainty that can exist in the brain. Anxiety doesn’t ask “What if terrible things happen?” but instead says, “Terrible things are going to happen. What are you going to do about it?”

Each day begins and ends with the pill tray. In the morning, it’s the antipsychotic Abilify, anti-anxiety Buspar, and antidepressant Prozac. In the evening, Buspar returns with the famed mood stabilizer, lithium. Within the first four hours of waking, I’ll know if I haven’t taken my medications by a sudden tightness in my chest or a nervous tingling across my skin. When this happens, I rush to choke down a cracker or two before taking them.

May 27, 2020

“You need to understand, if something happens, if the worst happens, we cannot let you inside,” Dr. Waters says through her mask, looking up into my face. Her eyes are beautifully made up, achieving a doe-eye effect. I wonder, momentarily, if she is in love with someone in her office. Her gloved hand reaches towards my dog. “With COVID, no one but staff is allowed inside the clinic.”

The trees are a riot of color as I drive past the grounds of the Episcopal Church in my town. The field that becomes the annual pumpkin patch worthy of inclusion in a Peanuts special is heartbreakingly bare. Every fall since I moved to this New England town over twenty years ago, the arrival of the pumpkins has been a seasonal passage.

At first I didn’t even realize you were there. You sprung up seemingly overnight, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. I was thirteen, my body already changing in all kinds of ways.

Dear Doctor S.,

I can’t believe I wake up each morning thinking about how much I love my husband, instead of engaging in the mental gymnastics of how to avoid him for yet another day.