This day begins with light. It casts shadows against the thick oatmeal curtains that dress my bedroom window: shadow of leaves on the Ficus that wraps around this corner of the house; shadow of the picture of my dear and dead friend I keep behind the curtain on the windowsill for the days when I can’t look at him; shadow of I cannot be sure what else from here in bed, but what I imagine must be shadow for the sake of this morning’s visual drama.

My window faces east, so every day here begins with light in some form. But there’s a rarity in this shine. It wants to fill even the lungs of any creature in its reach, and it seems to slow time in a molasses glow. Still in bed, I feel the sweet tension of not knowing how much time is left before the light diffuses itself back to cool workaday tones.

This is the brightest my bedroom will be all day.

Soon enough, the light does shift, and I sneeze. I sneeze again. And again. And it’s this kind of day now, wherein I am in a rapture of sneezes from what I have inhaled through the night. 

Visions dance behind my closed eyes. I’m receiving the world through incredibly short movements, like a character in stop motion. Tissues collect around me as I make my way out of bed. The bottle of antihistamines I keep at my bedside is in my sight, in my hand, and a little white pill jumps from my fingers to my tongue. 

My head is swimming through dust and snot, and I can hardly finish a thought between each sneeze. It’s in this ecstasy, free from time and control, that I imagine I am a body made of window screens, and I am allergic to what collects in my skin. I groan and curse with weak air through a stuffed nose, ineffectually willing myself back to the world. It’s time to get up.

As the daytime antihistamine works its magic, I stumble through morning. Eyedrops. Coffee. Morning, mom. Sneeze. Creamer. Sneeze. Can you hand me a tissue, please. Thanks. Sneeze. 

I take my coffee outside today. Cold concrete scratches under my bare feet as I shuffle out to our little wood bench. It bends and creaks under me, and I finally look up to the day. It’s exceedingly bright, and a thin haze lingers over everything like in the final scene of A Nightmare on Elm Street when Nancy is still trapped in her dream. Still a daze myself, I am uneasy at the comparison. Fluttering and chirping erupts a few feet above my head and scares me so bad I nearly drop my very full mug. Coffee splats on the ground, and I look up to see nothing at all. It must have been the birds that nest in our roof, but they are nowhere to be found. Again, I am uneasy. Morning dew falls from the roof tiles on my toes. I wonder what little lives are in the water and whether I’ve just contracted a foot fungus.

A little later, I am caffeinated and made-up with a red lip and driving to work. The energy from this strange morning mixed with coffee and antihistamine is thrumming in my body. My playlist on shuffle, The National’s “Bloodbuzz Ohio” starts up, and the lyrics mindlessly run from my throat out the open windows. Here, in this little Honda, everything feels both electric and pensive. Autumn splashes across each suburban scene I meet. Pedestrian faces squint through the dry sunshine. Leaves tumble from their cement-median-bound mothers and dance in gusts of wind as cars rumble on.

My day slows down in the fluorescent light of work. I’m a writing tutor at a college learning center on the third floor of an ugly grey building. Today, the two staff computers are occupied by my coworkers, and we have no students waiting for help, so I take the liberty of reading between bits of small talk. I pull out my weathered copy of Ray Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree, which I began last night. In this third week of October, the weather in SoCal is just now beginning to hint at a true autumn, but only after sunset. Reading Bradbury’s vision of autumn out of my open window into the dark felt like a sort of summoning spell for good bad weather. I hope it does the trick soon. Here, under on-the-clock white light, I feel October wind lash my face and hear jack-o-lantern laughs in the distance, if only for small moments when I can focus on the words in front of me. 

I’m partial to old copies like this one–a 1974 print copped from ThriftBooks–for how they’ve softened before reaching my hands. The cover is well broken-in, clearly having been loved, and the pages show their age by their amber color and strong, sweet smell. A dear friend recently told me that smell is almond and vanilla, present to us in the breakdown of chemicals that were used to make paper. Indulgent for a sense of elsewhere in time and space, my pulse picks up each time I can steal even a moment with Bradbury here in all this sweetness of a little old book.

Soon enough, my shift is through. Every day after work, I desperately crave my time back, as though that’s something I can make happen. Lately, though, time has had my hand in a tight, pinching grip like an overtired mother who’s just about lost her patience with her toddler. I have chronic pain, and it’s been worsening as the days of fall drag on. The tendons in my ankle never fully recovered from a bad fall I took years ago while abroad for a deeply foolish whirlwind romance. My ankle broke forward and dislocated left, and I’ve walked with stabbing pain ever since.

My pain is a fact, but my x-rays routinely come back with nothing out of the ordinary, and my orthopedic doctor refuses to help beyond telling me that he cannot take away my pain, which will be lifelong, and to keep up daily activities, or else I’ll get depressed. He says this as though I’m not paying attention. As though I can’t feel my pain tightening its hold around my life, making me waste hours on hours trying to avoid it with weed, screens, and stasis. I know I shouldn’t blame him, really. He looks at the x-ray and sees what he’s been taught. But I need guidance, and I’ve yet to meet with a god I recognize. So, it’s time for something new: a two-and-a-half-hour pain management group twice a week via Zoom.

My impression going into this is that it’s going to be a lot of old people with names like Deborah, who don’t know how to use Zoom, oversharing about their pain and medical trauma. I suspect to be walked through ugly PowerPoints of basic advice: meditate, eat more vegetables, talk to a friend or loved one, don’t lose hope. 

Home from work now, I log in to the meeting with my camera off and half a mind to leave after five minutes if it sucks. And I was right. There are five Deborahs. Everyone I can see has their device at the least flattering angle possible, one with her cell phone camera directly in front of her tablet webcam so we cannot see her at all, shouting that she is not sure where the meeting went. Several others are unmuted, carrying on conversations with family as they shuffle around before we begin, and a few even introduce themselves to no one in particular in the meeting. 

“Hi. I’m Debbie.”

“Hi, Debbie. I’m Cathy. How are you?”

“I’m okay. Are we waiting? I’ve never done this before, I don’t know.”

“Oh, oh, me neither. I don’t know what we’re waiting for, I guess the doctor. I’ve never done a group thing like this, but I’ve been living with pain for half my life, so I can wait a little longer.”

They laugh, and I crack a small smile. So sure in my fear that this will be a mess and a waste of time, I almost dip out right then and there. Let the Deborahs have their meeting. This isn’t for me. But something tells me to hold on– a voice cutting through the cacophony of the technologically unsavvy, sweet women. If I leave now to the retreat of some cozy, weed-laced distraction, nothing will have changed. I will have barely tried to engage what might be good for me. I will have nothing to anchor me as I take my unsteady painful steps, besides the time-and-mind-wasting copes I have already chosen.

So, I stay. I stay through the clumsy introductions and lengthy stories about the medical and personal history of these complete strangers. I stay through the ugly PowerPoint that outlines the basics of chronic pain that I already read online. I stay through the doctor’s lecture, which feels to me increasingly like a sermon. And at the end of the first half (what I have learned is the psychological portion of our meeting) I have heard from a group of almost entirely women with much more life experience than I, sharing how they have suffered from pain for 15, 27, 32 years. I am 28 years old and have been dealing with my injury for just two years. I try not to let this reality crush me flat, and instead treat it like a gift. I can learn something here, even if it’s just how to sit sober with strangers who mirror my pain.

By this point, my hips and lower back are so tight that they feel pissed off with me for sitting at a computer so long, and my 5 o’clock fatigue is setting in. The second half of group, led by a physical therapist, is starting in a few minutes, so I take my laptop and retreat to my dark bedroom. I plop belly-down on the bed. Relief radiates from my lower back as I kick my knee up and anchor my hip to the mattress. This is the best part of my day. The meeting window opens, and we all meet the physical therapist, who confesses that she also really doesn’t know how to use Zoom or computers in general. She starts up another PowerPoint, and my eyes drift open and close as I listen to her talk about how our brains de-prioritize pain signals when we are, for example, in a rush and bump into a piece of furniture. Sometimes, we won’t remember any pain from that bump because we were distracted by whatever needed to be done right at that moment. She says this is how we get mystery bruises. Eyes closed, I remember all the women in my life who fear they are anemic from the number of bruises they cannot account for, and I think of the wonderful line from Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives: “I saw a dozen women who were rushed, sloppy, irritated, and alive; I wanted to hug every one of them!”

And I wake up in the dark. It’s 9:25. The meeting is over. Dammit. 

Inexplicably, I have Big Thief’s “Incomprehensible” stuck in my head. I lay there, now on my back, staring at the ceiling, guilt for sleeping through the meeting slowly giving way, and softly singing My mother and my grandma, my great grandmother too / Wrinkle like the river, sweeten like the dew / And as silver as the rainbow scales that shimmer purple blue / How can beauty that is living be anything but true?

Feeling something stir, I take my phone and earbuds, and I return to our creaky wooden bench outside. I play the song, and despite my fear and ankle pain, get up and let myself dance a little. My movements are clumsy with imbalance, some stabs of pain, and years without practice, but I feel alive. Out of breath when the song concludes, I sit back down and look up at the night. The sky is layered in dramatic clouds, stark in their contrast against deepening blues. They are bright from our suburban light pollution, but I have a hard time feeling bad about it right now. They’re beautiful.

I call my dear friend, the one who told me about the vanilla-almond chemical breakdown of old books. He knows today is my day to track and write about for this project, and asks how it’s been. For the first time in what feels like years but is probably more like weeks, I laugh and say with a full heart, “Honestly, today was really fucking good.”

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Abby Rollins is a writer and poet from Orange County, California. She continues to “live-work-play” in OC as a college writing tutor, and looks for artistic community wherever she goes. In her spare time, she practices painting, grows mushrooms, and watches movies she has already seen