HIDING THE SYMPTOMS
The nausea had a schedule.
Five forty-seven every morning without fail — I knew because I started checking the time, tracking it the way you track something you are trying to understand and contain. My phone on the nightstand, the numbers glowing in the dark, and then the feeling arriving like something that had set its own alarm and was punctual about keeping it. I would get up carefully —and I would go to the bathroom and I would run the tap and I would manage it.
I was managing a great deal.
I was managing all of it and I was managing it alone and I was — if I was honest with myself in the specific privacy of the bathroom at five forty-seven in the morning — frightened.
Not of him.
Never of him.
Frightened by the size of what was happening — in a wing of a man
