is the water slapping the drain.

Two minutes and thirty seconds have passed.

Jenny, check in with me,

I say again, moving my ear closer

toward the door and feeling

my pulse begin to knock

its way out of my chest.

Three minutes have passed.

Jenny, check in . . .

—I’m okay, Andrea, she says,

just as my hand reaches for the knob.

Don’t do that again or I’ll kill you! I yell.

Jenny laughs. The line

of girls behind me in the hallway

laughs with her.

Then Jenny starts singing again.

And after some time,

I do too.

LOVE ME TO LIFE

I got sick in 2003, and as much as I tried, illness was a relationship I could never manage to leave. In spite of seeing every doctor in Colorado, I could not divorce my body from its pain. In 2010, I woke up in a scream that lasted eight months. A Charley horse bucking through my blood. I didn’t believe I could live through it for half an hour, then half a year passed and it was still nowhere close to tamed. I struggled to walk from my bed to the bathroom, left my house for nothing but my shows. That I didn’t just cancel what would have been healthy to cancel was a side effect of both shame and having been raised proudly working class by a father who hated having a heart attack less than he hated having to call in sick because of it. To make it through my tour, I wore an eight-year-old’s pink sequin dance leotard hidden beneath my clothes for every reading— a makeshift compression suit to ease the pain bought at a dance store beside a venue on a night I knew it would be as easy for me to stand up on stage for sixty minutes as it would for me to win the Olympics. Every week a new doctor would ask my symptoms. I’d always answer, My blood feels like crushed glass. I had no other way to explain it. They had no idea what to do. Once during a layover in Chicago, my legs at that point atrophied to toothpicks, it took me ninety minutes to walk from one gate to the next. By the time I boarded, I felt so close to death I was certain the plane would be my casket, so right before takeoff I lost it—wailing like an ambulance in the aisle of United 685 until the plane stopped on the runway and turned around to feed me to the arms of medics. Needless to say, it wasn’t the sexiest moment of my life. Though do I believe the flight attendants still dream about me—I guarantee it’s not because they think I’m freaky in a good way. Some months later I finally got diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease, started a pantry of meds and was improving, but when I hit a roadblock in healing, I began a weekly treatment where essentially they’d take out my blood, clean it, and put it back in. During my first appointment, I almost vomited seeing that my blood was the color of tar and a similar texture. The doctor said it was common with the disease, but it gave me the willies watching something come out of my veins that looked like it had come from a gutter. One week, noticing my blood had worsened after I’d gotten into an argument with a friend, I became obsessed with what I might be able to do on my own to turn my blood red. Before every weekly appointment I’d experiment. What happens to the color when I meditate? What happens when I do yoga? What happens if I put nothing in my body but seaweed, dandelion leaves, and juiced kale? What happens if I bathe in salted crystals while chanting into my root chakra while breathing sage into the lungs of a cloud shaped like Mother Mary admitting some sexy devil swallowed her holy cherry? Some of my experiments actually helped brighten my blood a bit but not so much that I wasn’t losing faith and, sunk by despair, I spent an entire long weekend doing nothing but drinking and fucking. Mostly fucking—a woman I’d adored for years but had only recently had the courage to ask out, or ask in, since I still could rarely go out. She stayed with me for three days and I don’t remember a minute where I didn’t feel like a country farm boy getting gratefully ruined in the bed of his daddy’s truck. My body, a graffitied confession booth turned inside out for this woman’s truth. At one point a pig walked over from the neighbor’s field, pressed his snout to the door, and fogged up the glass watching us get dirty on a bean bag on the living room floor. We stopped as soon as we saw the pig, shooed the kinky angel back to his home, and kept going. Walking into my appointment on Monday morning, I was so terrified of the dark I knew they’d find inside of me, I slammed my eyes closed when the doctor slid the needle into my arm. They were still shut when he belted,
Jesus Christ! I opened my eyes and my blood