Besides, I never wake up properly when my alarm goes off before the sun comes up. I don’t mind clouds. Sunlight is better than rain, but the sun is always there, even when the sky is a blanket of gray. I do mind darkness.

I breathed in sunlight and breathed out wakefulness. The cat twined around my ankles, chirping his weird, breathy chirp, and by the time I opened my eyes, I was ready for the day. Outside my room, I could hear my housemates going through their own morning routines. For Mandy, that involves singing in the shower, even though she sounds like she’s gargling bees. For Lucas, it means cooking something way too elaborate for the hour, so he can pretend he’s the master of his own schedule, and he doesn’t care about needing to do dishes as soon as he gets off work. Now that I was paying attention, I could smell frying eggs and sweet baking waffle batter. If I hurried, I might be able to get him to share. He always makes too much, never having quite gotten the hang of portion control.

I stayed where I was. The cat gave another turn around my ankles and I bent to scoop him into my arms, letting him slam his furry head into the bottom of my chin so hard my teeth clacked together from the impact. He settled down to purr. I watched the sunlight filter through the trees in the backyard, and tried—as I did almost every morning—to remember my dreams.

Trees. Screaming. The flower with the dragonfly petals I used to see everywhere when I was a little girl. Something in the air, the taste of copper, the feeling of lightning in my veins. The same jumble of unconnected images that haunted me most nights, as formless and fading as they always were. My therapist says the key to my depression is hidden somewhere in my subconscious mind; I’m supposed to write down my dreams for her. My dream diary is like a checklist of the same elements, over and over again, a tidy recipe for making me slowly lose my mind.

When I was three years old, someone snatched me off the street in front of my grandparents’ old house near Mt. St. Helens. They kept me three days before bringing me back unharmed, still wearing the same dress and little sweater I’d had on when they’d taken me. Then they’d disappeared, fading back into whatever nightmare they’d slithered out of. They were never caught. They were never identified. For all I know, they’re still out there somewhere, snatching happy little girls and hauling them away for whatever reasons seem to make sense to them.