Lying around so much I found myself having many discussions about paint. It was more natural, too, than I would have thought. We were playing Bananagrams, scooting the cool little tiles around with sweating fingers and she said, “You know, this room is the same color as your room”, so I looked and of course it was. In fact, it was two colors, a dark mossy green on two of the walls and cream on the other two, with the trail of leaf stencils wrapping around the doorframe from the hallway and marching into the corners of the small room. The stencils in mine were different, but the same odd coloring graced my walls. It was almost funny, and almost nostalgic, that I had taken such an inert piece of my bedroom with me when I had transported what I believed to be just my sleeping things to the floor below.

I reached for my water, gnawed on the straw while contemplating my letter tiles, the words like emissaries of the vaster English language-squash, qi, jot, waned. A handful of the everyday and the exotic, arranged beside each other into a neatly intersecting grid. My lips pulled at the plastic, but I only received a stale rattle from the bottom of the cup. Mary was staring downward, in defeat or in concentrated silence. I knew that, with her stack of unused letters bloating as the game progressed, she was waiting for me to ask her to fill my water, maybe with ice. She was waiting for me to need another pillow to prop behind my head, or some slippers. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy pampering, but I set the cup back down on the table, out of the way of the game, deciding just to be thirsty for a while.

It was Mary, too, who asked me when I had painted my kitchen. I didn’t know, couldn’t have even named the warmth of the color had I not been looking at it. “I think it came this way. I don’t think we ever painted it. No, wait”. Glancing at the doorway, I saw an old metal ladder we have since lost track of, adorned with masks and hardening brushes tipped with a pink sort of beige or peach. The plastic sheets too, I remember, shellacking our hardwood temporarily, and showering paint dust upon any unwitting soul who had the audacity to duck beneath those hanging from the doorframes. Still, I couldn’t name a year. What I do know is the way Greg and I held our breaths, running through, for weeks after the fumes had dissipated, terrified by some undefined side effect of inhalation. Once, Devon nabbed us on our way, holding us down until we kicked free, without screaming to conserve the air supply of elementary school-sized lungs. We pelted halfway up the stairs, gasping and panting once we had deemed ourselves safe. “My parents did it their selves. I used to be afraid to breathe in the paint”, I say even though ‘afraid’ is not really the right word. But Mary laughs. Going to school where we do, we know all the ways there are to get high.

Mary was a good visitor, meaning not a loud one. I fell asleep on her once. Rather, I drifted in her presence. I heard her at the door, heard her walking down the hall to the back room, with Mom saying “She’s right back here”. There was barely a ruffle between them when they saw that I had submitted to my pillow, eyes closed. She sat on the couch and read, placing beside her with the slightest clink a lunchbox which I knew to contain a delivery of strawberry-raspberry-honey frozen yogurt, blended in her own kitchen, iced formidably solid in her own freezer. I knew because I had encountered this same strict block of a dairy desert yesterday, and we had laughed about the way our spoons scraped up the edges in delicate, frosted curls, just the way you would eat an Italian ice. I lay as it thawed across from me on the couch, lay as it reached a consistency penetrable by silverware, lay as it softened further than it needed to. Once, at the lake, I had shunted my way out from the dock in Greg’s little blow-up rowboat, the paddles of which were washing themselves, somewhere, into thickets of pond weed, and lay back to let the wind reunite me with the shore as it would. I was breathing evenly, eyelids shut as curtains against the gentle sun, and when I was still rocking my slow way, out fifty feet from the float, as Dad and Devon loaded the car, I let them call me. My toes could shift and find the water over the plastic prow, but I was wrapped in the deafness that comes only from a lolling, lazing sort of peace. So, in the make-shift bedroom, could I raise myself briefly on one elbow to sip from my water bottle, then pull the sheet halfway across my face. Yet, even as my head left the pillow, it was still connected by the heaviest of threads, and I let Mary on the couch call and call in silence. Later, she told me that when I had half-woken for that moment, for a drop of water, nothing more, she had kept her eyes down and on her book so that I wouldn’t have to meet them. Had I met them, I would have been awake; had I been awake I would have been obligated to disentangle myself from the sheets, to nod and smile. She left soon after, telling Mom on the way out that I probably needed my rest.

There were those sort of days, and others where my sleep felt stale and my eyes sicker and heavier for having been closed. Those times, I ghosted around the house, as much as one can resemble a phantom when dragging a walker over the raised thresholds of so many old doorways, clanking against stray radiators and wayward chairs. I had this vision, then, of myself nestled comfortably, though illegally, into the trunk of the van. Junie would, of course, be jilted out of her customary corner, large enough even with all the luggage for her to turn around. But we used to lay our heads on her stomach, tangle our fingers through her ears when she was sleeping, and when these loving violations peaked she seemed only ever capable of a sudden leap up from the ground and a gracious exit. When I imagined the car ride to Maine, I did not allow stuffy heat or motion sickness to taint her panting presence beside me. We would be banished to the back together for the five-hour journey, dog and invalid. At sixteen, I knew she needed space, but in my love for her I either intuited or simply conjured a reciprocal love in those brown, begging, doggy-eyes, and knew I had to have her with me. Once, Mom said the roads would be too bumpy before and after the highway, and from then on my imaginings contained the house’s supply of beanbags.

This was a mental construction from before the surgery, even, but in the aftermath, in a house emptier for its outflow of ice-cream-and-novel-bearing visitors, it became more sharply defined. I had this general fear, and one night I lay clenching some new torment of anxiety so hard into my stomach that I rolled over to see the clock, utterly sick. My throat was dry, but my water cup an anonymous column on my nightstand, in the dark. From across the room, 12: 18 glared in an LED red which seemed closer than it was. I had the strange feeling I often have at night, that I could reach out my hand and brush the ceiling, the bookshelves, the crop of flower-motif greeting cards across the cabinet. Things were not collapsing, but I was rushing out to meet them, in an equally violent, reversed claustrophobia. My throat pounded.

Mom”, I called, “Come lay with me”. In the hospital I had developed a frail way of speaking with only the very top of my voice, as if I were a small child, or on the tip of a sob. Often, I felt as if I were both. There was nothing in me then to deepen my pleas or give them any weight. There was nothing in me then that should lend fortitude to the mind of an almost-adult, or at least a far-from-child. From my hospital bed, I whined “My pain’s a 6, I need my button” and “Read to me?” Now I called “Come lay with me” into a restless darkness that tugged my age away even as it tugged my face closer to the 12: 19 starkness of the red clock. And she did come, like always.

It was with that same sense of surety that I spoke of Maine; I never asked, always careful to reference the coming trip as a certainty. I would peck around the subject, laying down my phrases as tiles in a complex mosaic. Last year, in the time of Corey, I had developed a sort of game in which I would never be the first to bring him up. Instead, I would drop breadcrumbs throughout the conversation, in a manner that I took excessive pride in, until someone else had been led to his name. Then and only then would I be free to walk around and around him out loud, my awe seemingly drawn from me, rather than so eagerly offered. I talked about Maine in a way that was, at once, the same and not the same. About a week before the Fourth of July, Mary asked when she could come back for another visit and I said, “We’re not really sure yet when we’re leaving for my grandparents’ cottage, but it will probably be on Thursday. So any time before then, really”. “All right, great. Do you wanna call me when you’re free?” “Why don’t you call, or text or whatever, since I’m, ya know… trapped. I would say you have the schedule we have to worry about”. And she picked up on that ironic twist we had cultivated in speaking to each other, and said “Yeah, I would say so”, and we laughed about that for a while.

When she was gone, Dad sprawled back onto the couch with a groan that tapered off into a sigh. He was staring up at the ceiling, the gentle rise of his paunch arcing upwards as well, arms folded back to support his neck. I hadn’t missed his expressions, or Mom’s, and I knew what was coming. “You’re not going to Maine”, he said to the air above him.

It was strange how placidly I received this. I snuggled beneath my blankets for a silent moment, letting my cheek fall to the cool pillow, and wondered detachedly why it was that he might have just said, “The mail came”, or “The dog wants to come in”. I poked about introspectively, searching for the pressure of anxious tears with precisely the same emotion that I often pawed through my pencil pouch for a pad of sticky notes. Before too much time had passed, I said “Yes I am” and wasn’t worried any more.

And anyways I had other things to be fretful about. Not in the usual sense; not in the way of homework or weekend chores or dreaded encounters with sharp objects at the doctor’s office. To understand anxiety in its truest form, you have to wake up late, stare at the wall, let hunger crescendo slowly in your drowsy stomach, let your bones slowly settle like anchors into sand, stare at the door and wait for someone to walk by, let pain crescendo between your shoulder blades, directly behind your collar bone, in the dips and hollows of your spiny back, stare at the wall, reach up to tug at your lips, mold them. Slowly. Now you can hear everything outside, from the shrill of the little girls across the street to an early lawn mower starting up a few houses down. You want to be sick from feeling the morning slide over your skin like sandpaper, taking a bit of you along with each passing minute. Time is not renewable. You can feel the lint growing between your toes.

Greg stopped in to play a couple rounds of Connect Four. It was one of the only games we could find that I could play lying on my side; most others I couldn’t see. He had dragged up the leather ottoman to my bedside table, but soon he was half off of it, twitching and wiggling like he does, so I let him go. When I closed my eyes again, the laziness of it all pounded into me with the full force of a headache. I thought about how, in Maine, curling up on the swaybacked old couch on the porch would feel like a rest, a true rest, peace in the way you can only feel when you have nestled the heart of you down in one place, a round, warm stone, and the rest of the world comes down around you with all the little flutterings and settlings of a sheet that someone has spread across the air above your head and is just now returning to the ground.

Later that day, I threw my book vengefully at a chair and sobbed until Mom ran in. And she said, “You haven’t eaten yet and its one o’clock. You’re hungry and overtired”. I turned up my shoulder at warm toast and peanut butter so she sank down on the coffee table. “Something, anything you want”. I was warbling into a pillow. “How about some chocolate?” “Nooo”. “You’ve earned it”. “No”. “Just a piece, just a little piece?” Then she hugged me and I screamed “You don’t understand”. My face against her shoulder was shaking with the effort of conveying to her her mistake. Because she didn’t say anything after that, I repeated it over and over. You don’t understand, you don’t understand. Although she probably did, and I probably didn’t.

A few hours later I went into her arms again and whispered that I was sorry, so that she would say “No, I just feel bad for you.” And so that I could cry again. And so that she would steer me to the kitchen so we could unpack the basket from the farmer’s market and find me some carrots to nibble, since I was suddenly hungry.

It was not long after that she started bringing home peaches, along with the carrots, along with the squash and beets and onions and green beans. I developed a craving for them. They seemed to me, had always seemed since childhood, perfect and golden orbs, which held summer beneath their skin, summer as drops on your tongue and ringing your lips to be licked off. I liked to hold them in my hand before I ate them, intuiting their roundness to relate them somehow to eggs. Something a little like a box and a little like a seed, which struck me as even more alive when warm.

We had peaches sitting in a shallow china dish on the kitchen counter, which I would prod on my daily walks to that end of the house and back. They remained firm against my foraying fingers. They refused to let the telltale softness bloom across their delectably pink skin. Impatience thrived on the sheer length of my days. I wanted a peach, had to have one. Next time through the kitchen, I reached for the largest of the globes, and cradled it against my stomach with one hand as I was led by the other back to my room. When I bit down, the flesh came away onto my tongue hard and good, but not ripe. I didn’t dare be disappointed, because it was sweet, so I savored the sweetness between my teeth. But at the same time, I knew what I was missing.