Lena had explained what it meant over lunch, and Nic had felt at the time she understood and that her outlook would be changed by this understanding. She hadn’t thought of it since and now she can’t for the life of her (funny expression in the circumstances) remember what it was all about. Still, it loops through her mind. Aren’t all circles closed? It’s what makes a circle a circle and not an arc, a crown a crown and not a tiara.

Time is a closed circle.

She already knew that time—or perception of time—was relative. Busy days at work last half as long as quiet ones, and the time spent watching TV fled twice as fast as even the busy-days time at work. Except for the business segment of the news part, during which she experienced ten minutes as thirty. But the thing that is happening now, has been happening since she fell, is different. Time is neither fast nor slow. If it weren’t for the changing light, and the fact that her crotch is sometimes wet and sometimes dry, she might believe time had stopped altogether. Is that what death is? An eternal present?

She has heard that phrase before, too. Lena again, most likely. How could someone from this family be so damn smart? The girl is a miracle.

The light, and the dryness of her pants, seem to be on a loop, but not everything. For one, the blood was wet and hot and then cold and sticky and has been unchangingly dry for minutes or maybe hours. Not days, she thinks. Probably not. Hunger had whispered and then screamed and then fallen silent, at which point thirst’s long-present whine became unbearably loud. It too has gone and not come back.

The pain has not changed much, but she used to feel that escaping it was a matter of urgency whereas now its existence seems inevitable. She knows there was a time before the pain but can’t remember what it was like. This, now, is what it feels like to be.

There is something about this new way of being that is worse than the physical pain and that is the presence of Steve. He has not existed as anything other than an occasional stabbing thought for over twenty years and she has worked hard to control her exposure to even that version of him. Not because she doesn’t love him but because she does, too much, and it is unbearable—people use that word to mean hard, but she means actually not possible to be borne—to have him in her thoughts but not in her life. She has not let him go entirely. She keeps what remains of him in a safe place she can visit every so often when she needs reassurance that he was ever real.