Turn 16 of 23

Lie still and let the haze and the wish carry her deeper

The days stop being days. They become a single, unbroken warmth — a golden temperature that has no morning or evening, no Tuesday or Saturday, no before or after. Lena lies in it the way a stone lies in a riverbed, and the river is the wish, and the wish carries her deeper.

Her eyes stay closed for long stretches now. Not sleeping — she doesn't think she's sleeping, though the line between sleep and waking dissolved years ago — but resting. Resting in the way her body has been asking her to rest since she was a teenager tugging at waistbands in front of a bathroom mirror. The kind of rest where the muscles stop holding and the mind stops checking and the whole architecture of a person settles into itself like a house finding its foundation. She breathes. The breath is slow and deep and it moves through the vast geography of her body like wind through a valley. Her belly rises and falls, rises and falls, and each rise is a small mountain range and each fall is a slow, warm avalanche.

The cigarette burns in her fingers. She lights them without opening her eyes now — muscle memory, the lighter clicking and the flame catching and the first drag pulled into lungs so deep and vast that the smoke gets lost in them. She smokes down to the filter and drops it somewhere beside her and doesn't track where it lands. The ash piles on the slopes of her body — her breasts, her belly, the soft folds of her neck — and she doesn't brush it off. It settles into the topography of her skin like snow on a landscape that doesn't mind the cold. The wine bottle rests between her thigh and the couch arm, and she reaches for it the way a tide reaches for shore — slowly, inevitably, without thought — and drinks with her eyes closed and the wine running down her chin and pooling in the hollow of her neck.

Her body releases everything without her permission or her attention. A fart, long and wet, rumbles out of her and she doesn't tense or relax to make it happen — it simply happens, the way her heart beats, the way her lungs fill. Urine warm against the couch beneath her, soaking into layers that will never dry. The soft, heavy shift of her bowels emptying without announcement, spreading beneath her, adding to the warm, thick foundation she rests on. A belch rolls up from somewhere deep in her gut — a sound so low and resonant it vibrates the empty wine bottles on the floor — and her mouth opens and closes and the taste of smoke and acid and wine sits on her tongue and she doesn't mind it. She has stopped minding things. That was the whole point.

The wish works. She can feel it — not as a force but as a direction, a gentle, ceaseless pull toward more. More softness, more warmth, more flesh, more surrender. Her body expands in imperceptible increments, the way a glacier moves, the way a century passes. She is growing and she will keep growing and the growth is so slow and so steady that it feels less like change and more like breathing — an involuntary rhythm her body has learned, a tide that comes in and never goes out. The couch has disappeared beneath her. The floor is disappearing. She is becoming the room. And the room is becoming her. And in the golden dark behind her closed eyes, where the haze is thickest and the warmth is deepest, Lena feels something she has never felt before in her life.

Nothing. She feels nothing — no anxiety, no restlessness, no itch to be different or do different or want different. The nothing is not emptiness. The nothing is fullness. The nothing is the sound a body makes when it has finally, after twenty-four years of fighting, stopped fighting. She lies in it. She breathes in it. The cigarette smoke curls toward the yellow ceiling. The wine sits warm in her stomach. The wish hums in her bones. And Lena Park, who whispered a wish in a bathroom mirror and meant it more than she knew, lets the warmth carry her deeper, and deeper, and deeper still.