Sleep clouds in as I stare at the last sentence, wanting and unable to offset it with something more hopeful (and that’s a failure, one of a million failures) but also, fuck it, my having written it down and acknowledging the truth of it will have to be hope enough. I let myself slump into my chair. I don’t need to leave and retreat to my bedroom. I’m in the chair now and I’m in the chair in my head. Inside my head is a perfect replica of the house. I wander the hallway of this house. The hallway is quiet but not static, like everyone and everything the hallway is in the process of slowly decaying, and I realize this is what the hallway is like when no one is in it because I’m not in it now. Then I vapor down the stairs and into the dining room and I won’t look at the latched basement door, and then I go to the kitchen and the light is off, but I see the outline of my blue jacket I left on the chair, and I’ll have to move that tomorrow. Not because Mom would get upset. I don’t want to make the living-arrangement boundaries we set more permeable, and that’s how I feel right now, in this sleeping and not-sleeping state. Permeable. Then I leave the kitchen, not sure where I’m going next, but I am going and with intention, until I stir awake. And by that I mean I leave my head, which is disorienting. It’s as though I’ve gone back in time to before I toured the house. I sit in my desk chair, and I still feel permeable, which means I’m not sure if I remain in the house in my head, and a flicker of fear and excitement at the thought that maybe I’ve always been in the house in my head. But no, this is happening. I am standing up now. There are the pressures and subtle physical sensations one cannot mentally replicate. I flicker out into the hallway, but I do not linger. I choose not to linger. I’m thirsty. No, I make the conscious decision to be thirsty, which, I think, means I’m trapped in both spaces; the real house and the head house. I walk downstairs and my back doesn’t hurt despite my previously hunched-over sleeping position. My back is loose, and it feels good, great even, but I don’t trust it. It’s a too-good-to-last feeling. The same with my head. My head is too good to last. The earlier wine headache is gone, and the space behind my eyes is pressure-free and waiting to be filled. I am light and it feels dangerous, and I know there’s danger somewhere, but I can’t identify it yet, and I want to giggle at the absurdity and assuredness of it all. In the dining room, retracing steps that weren’t stepped, I concentrate on the scratch and tickle of my bare feet on the rug to keep me rooted. I am so very thirsty, I decide, and my body obliges with dried, cracking lips, tightening throat, and a not-wholly-unpleasant quivering throughout my water-starved body. It’s not unpleasant because my body knows our hungry-machine needs are at the precipice of being fulfilled. We are always at one precipice or another. In the kitchen now, and I see well enough to not have to turn on the light. My blue jacket is not draped over the kitchen chair, but our wineglasses are still on the table as though waiting for us to come back to pick up where we left off, to finish what was supposed to be finished. At the sink I turn on the tap and let the cold water run over and through my hand and wrist and then to fill a glass. I luxuriate in the sensation again because I’m still so permeable. I’ll decide to worry about that after I decide I am no longer thirsty. I drink and I drink forever and the cold fills me until it doesn’t. I am both recharged and thinning away, but then, an unbidden thought: Mercy is in the basement again. I drop the emptied glass and it clinks and clatters into the sink. Mercy has returned and she is in the basement again and that is why I am permeable. But that’s not how I felt the last time I was with her and the other last time before that. There’s no pain, and my heart isn’t spasming, and, if anything, my heart has gone quiet, gone into hiding. Regardless, what am I going to do? I waver into the dining room and stare at the basement door. Mercy is somewhere below. In the house in my head, I don’t dare go down into the basement. I am not permeable. I am here. Should I simply run away again? Get out of her range? Where would I go this time? And what about Mom? In her bedroom, in what was our TV room when I was a kid, Mom coughs. She coughs on cue, as though I decided she should cough. I am not permeable. I am diffuse. I am in the air. I can reach without reaching. I can be at the basement door and back here in the mouth of the kitchen. I don’t open the basement door even if the latch quivers to become unlatched. The metal hook vibrates and clinks as though my fingers tickle it. Inertia is a lie. With my hands at my side, I don’t feel my side. Instead, I feel the latch and hold its thin, coiled tensile strength, and I lift then let it drop. I am diffuse. The latch is at rest. I don’t run for the front door and to my car and then away, driving until I’m out of gas or out of road, and then on foot, walking until I’m forgotten. I wisp more than scuttle (I think I have done this before) the short journey to the TV room. The French doors are open. I don’t go into the room, and I don’t stand over her sleeping form like a mantid fiend. I hover, a cloud in the doorway. A crouched, kyphotic shape sits on my mother’s chest. There isn’t much light, but as the shape flexes and unflexes, adjusts, throbs like a heart, I see it is blue. It is a blue heart. I do not feel diffuse anymore. All of me has returned to here. It’s a blue heart until it turns. It has a head and it has a face. A face I’ve seen twice before, but also I’ve never seen it before, but also I see it every day. Within its focused malevolence (am I mistaking focus for a cold disinterest, a witness who has seen the worst and the best and it knows which will always be remembered?) and hunger and despair, I’m allowed to wonder would Mom or anyone else see it is so clearly my face, or made from the same clay as my face? Its lips move in sync to my thoughts, to my worst thoughts. It turns away and I still feel its lips moving and whispering my whispers. I drift backward into the living room, letting the scene in her bedroom shrink and recede. I lay down on the couch and close my eyes to sleep and live forever, and it’s—wonderful; I’m sorry and damn me but it is. I am not in my head and yet I do not feel the couch or anything else because I am diffuse and permeable. When I next open my eyes the blue jacket that is not a jacket has come back to me and pools on my chest. It rises and falls with my own breathing even though it doesn’t feel like I’m breathing.