My mother folded her jeans, her blouse and bra, put the johnny on, removed her underwear, modest. I heard my admonishments: you need a wax; and hers, we women need to air our gardens out. A new nurse parted the curtain.

“It’s time,” she said. My mother handed me her purse, her folded clothes, a list she had made of names to call when the surgery worked and she lived.

“I love you,” I said. Maybe she told me she loved me too. But then she was gone.

IN THE ICU waiting room there was a beige phone. Sporadically, it rang. An old woman with a “Volunteer” lanyard around her neck put down her book to answer, announce a name and hand the receiver to the nervous respondent. One by one, they listened and left.

At the water fountain I swallowed Xanax, hydrocodone. Dr. Holle had prescribed them at six-hour intervals. But the pain cut through and I counted more, swallowed more.

Time passed, shortened by trips to the fountain, pills. Time passed in phone calls, good news of beloved bodies delivered from sickness to health. It passed in memes of animals doing human tasks, YouTube clips of precocious girls, lip synching Mariah Carey. It passed in Instagram stories: kettlebell swings, healing rituals, girls posed in cabanas with their current reads #selfcare. And Jake, jumping from a plane, parachuting toward green fields, whooping. I reacted with a

“Where are you?” I wrote and waited.

The sun set purple, orange, pink, before night warmed the room’s fluorescence. The Volunteer packed her book and lunch Tupperware, removed her lanyard. “Good luck, honey,” she said on her way out the door. I was alone.

There was a TV in the corner and I turned up the volume, changed the channel. I never even looked at your husband, screamed a woman on the screen. I took another Xanax. With food, the bottle instructed. I rifled through my mother’s bag for cash, bought two bags of Cheez-Its from the vending machine. I ate, fast with the first, slower with the second, and felt myself transform, from empty to hungry, not full enough, still wanting. I eyed the vending machine, counted calories, checked Instagram. Ella had posted a new story in which she sat on a white couch, crying, her forehead so Botoxed it looked like laughter. But her eyes were wet, her mascara streaked, acne scars like braille, embossed into her skin. She hadn’t used a filter and the texture of her face stunned me.

She listed symptoms. Brain fog, fatigue, insomnia and pain that shot in sparks through every muscle. “I’ve now been diagnosed with multiple chronic conditions,” she said. “I’ve tried literally every treatment and nothing helps.”

I sent a

“My DMs are open,” she said, “if anyone has any ideas about what the problem really is.”

I sent a