The air smells like wet dog. From across the platform, I hear the screaming of a child I cannot see. I adjust the straps of my backpack and swallow repeatedly, trying to get the taste of something bitter and phlegmy out of my mouth. A bird swoops down low in the slate-colored sky. Its freedom is an intolerable affront. I imagine the fat of its gamey flesh melting over coals.

At work, I try to be closer to myself. In the bathroom mirror, I loosen a few strands of hair from the shellacked crown of my head, out of a desire to retain some part of the lacy, frizzy, misshapen quality of young, dumb identity. I try to protect my small and insignificant interests. I don’t smile back, even tepidly, at the people who have gone out of their way to hurt me. Instead, I sit perfectly still, swallowed up by the pylons of an office chair, and stew in the filthy miasma of my feelings. I stare at the keyboard as though it were within my power to write a prayer that could save me. Pain comes to a roiling boil and blasts my mind apart. What’s left behind is a pillar of cold, dark smoke.

In the desert of a dream, I scavenge for something I have lost in the sand. Fleeing the forest, my face wet with rain, I fall to my knees in the dew-dotted grass. Every passing glance, a sign. Every mark on the land, a symbol. Every rash on my body, a sigil.

We need the document by the end of the day, he says. I trek across a cool blue expanse of light to produce 100,000 words that no one will read and that will eventually decay into digital dust in a distant server-on-a-lake. Still, I persevere. I make the tiny, dead things I do bigger than they are. Responding to an unnecessarily cruel message with the right tone—a balance of frosty imperiousness and fatherly mercy, because I seek to forgive, I always want to forgive—takes on the importance of a holy mission. I close my eyes and dress myself in chainmail. Then I open my eyes to find an email chain dressing me down for a lack of confidence in internal meetings.

These are the rules, he says. I count to five slowly in my mind. This is the way things are, he says, and there are rewards in store for you. But rewarded—for what? If I answer that, I crumble. I truly don’t want the prize of his recognition. What do I want, then? The heights of this profession are not heights I want to reach. Every step is injurious to my self-respect. Every step takes me farther away from myself. From across the platform, I see her standing there, with my crudely made-up face and bloodshot eyes, holding out a trembling hand that I would have to leap across the tracks to reach. But what if I tried? What if I could know what destiny is available to me? What destiny for a determined but misguided paladin of the heartless 2030s, what fragment of fate reserved for an oversensitive career girl with zero ambition but every desire to sacrifice everything, if only it could mean something?

Clouds were colluding to cover the shyly emergent moon, at a bus stop astride a freshly tarred road, as a bargain was made between the devil and a female millennial. Under the ochre streetlights, she playfully gambled her life away for lack of anything better thing to do. In that puddle of light, she abandoned her future.

They were alone at the bus stop, and the silence of that road took on new dimensions; the air felt specific, hard, and real, as though diamonds had been scattered over the ground. Only the shadows of night were witnesses to the deal, and they made their disapproval clear in how they maneuvered to shade her face in a richly enigmatic, bruise-like blue. Miles away, the ocean—jealous master of mystery—hissed in white and ultramarine, desperate to wield the palette necessary to equal that color. “It’s not possible for you,” the night whispered, half in condolence, half in exultation. “You’re no sinner.”

A calfskin bag was slung over her left shoulder. As she spoke, in sweet, airy tones, she let her manicured hand graze idly over its leather panels. Her fingers, capped with eggshell tips, moved with the rhythm of a rich man enjoying flesh with his eyes. She wanted him to admire her hands, and then to appreciate the brand name emblazoned on her bag. The devil, a willing dance partner, smiled knowingly. She smiled back, lapping up the feeling of him looking at her, drinking in the heady, smoke-tinged air of the city—leisurely, lackadaisically, but nonetheless with a tinge of the anxious enthusiasm particular to the women of her time.

“It takes a lot of effort to look like this,” she said glibly. Then, with a calculated note of vulnerability, making a show of letting him into her sparkling, feminine inner world: “And a lot of product.”

“Uh-huh?” he asked mildly, pinching at the sleeve of his sheepskin jacket. “How much product?”

“Maybe five-hundred dollars’ worth. Ten different just like, things.” She was acutely aware of trying too hard, but couldn’t find it in herself to tone it down. Had she blown it by drawing attention to the necessity of all her balms and liquids? She hadn’t meant to insinuate she wasn’t naturally beautiful. She had merely wanted to appear both beautiful and accomplished. A work of art and its artist. A work of art and its dealer.

“Must take a lot of time to put that all on.”

“Oh yeah,” she said. Her painted lips, crowded around her chemically whitened teeth, made a moue of mock displeasure as vivid as blood circling a drain. “You can’t even imagine how long it takes for me to just ready for bed.”

He leaned against the cracked plastic wall of the bus shelter and raised an eyebrow.

They both understood that she found him attractive and that this was half the battle. She didn’t like anyone, but she liked him. She liked his obvious disregard, when she had opened the conversation with a remark on a tragic news headline, for the weight of the world, something she herself carried only uneasily, and only at arm’s length. She liked the implications of his identity, which he had revealed to her with so little attempt at secrecy that she’d been instantly disarmed. Every growing tendril of intuition, hacked off at the root. Every flicker of doubt, dispelled. (The ocean, night and moon, watching with weary understanding, sighed, and then co-signed the reality of the conjoined fate to come.) She had been charmed by him, and by possibility. The chance to flirt with the devil was intoxicating enough for her to agree to anything.

Later, she would blame the deceptive magic of that evening for her irresponsibility. She would ignore the memory of her uncomplicated joy at his lingering, clearly appreciative gaze. She would tell herself she was too tired from her job as a Senior Marketing Associate to think straight. Summoning all the energy of a peeved Human Resources manager, she would allege, in a cold, clipped, tone, that the deal was reached under duress. An expert in contract law, he would bark out a laugh.

The terms, decided under the limited light of the capricious stars, just as the bus pulled up, were as follows:

1. Her nighttime routine would be shorter by one minute every night henceforth.
2. No step would be compromised by the shortened time.
3. No takebacks.

She batted her lashes and agreed. They swapped social media handles and she immediately liked the first three of his photos. “I’ve never met anyone so eager to chat,” he said, as he boarded the bus, fingers of one beringed hand fluttering in a regal wave. “Thanks for that.” Strangers stared through the grimy windows.

In bed that night, her hair braided into loops, her cellphone casting a blue halo around her head, she went through his Instagram photos. He had fewer followers than she would have imagined, In his profile photo, he was standing on Rodeo Drive at sunset, holding up a severed lamb head. Blood dripped from his mouth. She couldn’t bear to think a single thought. She let the phone fall against her chest, screen down, and dozed off with only the moonrise on her mind.

For your birthday this year, you quit your job. You dropped the reins and let the leather lay flaccid on the grass. You spent a cold morning walking the old city, tears seeding your eyes like pearls. You didn’t respond when your body called out your name. You said: I mean, what for? I cannot look back and retrace my steps across the ocean. You cut those veins and let the footprints fill with blood.

You thought of everything you wanted to write but then, sitting at the keyboard after two months of swimming in a hole of darkness, you raised your hands to the uneven light and found them reduced to lumps of lunch meat. To restore their life would required sacrifice. You said: What do I have left to give? The amphora is already broken.

You spent hours in the red-colored badlands, squatting over artifacts of the distant past. You brushed the dust off their faces with a tenderness that felt pained, jagged, filthy. You scratched out messages with a scalpel. Where did you go? On the pieces of the amphora, a reply, long eroded into sand that shone in the air like scattered light. Once upon a time, there was something whole here, in this place where you hoard nothing but shards.

Magnolia petals on the asphalt, April 1994. For your birthday this year, promise that you will pack up your digger’s tools. Promise that you will cross the desert. Promise you will retreat to the forest, where the ruins of the old city are overgrown with moss, and where the insects have made homes in the hollowed-out traffic lights. There, it is possible to stand in the stream, the fish kissing your knees, their movements a map to a future not yet known to us, and feel clean in a new way, one that the water can neither give nor take away.

Currently living in a mood that feels like rapture. The rapture is joyless but the joylessness is a comfort. The light on the water has changed from sequins to scarlet, from foam to dust. But I have released any need for anything to be different than what it is.

I nick a finger with a knife. I nick the blade against a whetstone. The moon is a disc of gold and it gloats at me, but I have learned how to ignore it. I wet my palate with something persimmon-flavored. In the laboratory, standing goggled and gowned, Igor raises a bony hand from the lever and asks me if the job is done. My hands are gory with something that looks like strawberry puree. “No,” I say, enjoying the feeling of the word.

I listen to the outro of White Ferrari over and over until I can feel, simmering underneath my skin, the urge to cry. But I can let it go if that is my desire and today, desires are all that will lead me. I look at satellite images of Tokyo, the bay awash in clouds. “No,” I say again, and my expression clears like the morning after the rain.

Her nighttime routine consisted of forty different steps involving fifteen products and five parts of her body. First, she lit a white wax candle. Sweet, pink-petalled freesia swept into the room. Her head swam. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she meditated for ten minutes using a loving kindness app. “I forgive you,” she intoned, under the Benedictine guidance of a honeyed British voice. It was said with a genuine attempt at feeling, with the overwhelming desire to summon a revelation like the ones promised to her in the ads for therapy, and she waited expectantly, shivering in the center of her room in synthetic fleece pajamas. But when the tundra of her mind refused to react, she gave up easily, unsurprised—but bitter, nonetheless, at the notion that meditation wouldn’t work on her dog of a brain.

With a shiver of fear for what new pimple or freshly mottled patch she might encounter on its rolling hills and pockmarked fields, she moved onto her body. She twisted around in the dirty mirror to examine every hairy, blue-veined scrap of skin. She ran a roller of imitation green jade over pads of fat, lips pressed together tightly, eyes averted. She scrubbed at her elbows with an intricately woven towel imported from Korea. She applied a mud mask, then a sheet mask, and then a UV light mask. She cleansed, exfoliated, and moisturized her face. Balms, liquids, creams, gels. Baby blue, Pepto pink, grass green. She flossed and brushed her teeth with something battery-powered. In the warm yellow light, her bubblegum-flavored gingiva shone in her mouth like the gilded edges of an illuminated manuscript. (A decorative glint of blood along her lip line from overexuberant flossing.) She meticulously conditioned every strand of her dyed hair with animal fat before braiding it into a loop that she pinned into place. The clips she used cost fourteen dollars and were shaped and colored like monarch butterflies.

The first few nights after her encounter at the bus stop, she set a timer as she did her routine, checking it excitedly for time slippage, but detected no major changes. She thought about buying a notebook to track any deviations—preferably something with a velvet cover, in a red color with a copyrighted name, something like Wine of the Hesperides—and started searching Amazon for a suitable option. But that search was soon lost in the swamp of other potential purchases (a new freesia candle, with base notes of white lily and immortelle, a set of hydrocolloid patches shaped like candy hearts, a hair iron with a three-digit price tag, a black chihuahua with anguished eyes, a six-pack of cherry-flavored prebiotic drinks, a cherry-scented lip gloss, a cherry-colored knit sweater, a pair of plastic cherry-shaped earrings) and she soon forgot the devil and his bargain.

A week passed and a thousand other things took up residence in the endlessly generated rooms of her mind. Waves of anxiety worried at the wallpaper. No amount of lo-fi videos, with their pastel sunsets, their blinking stars, could calm her fears. A routine scan revealed a mass in her mother’s pancreas. An ex-boyfriend got married and posted artful, if a shade oversaturated, shots of his bottle-blonde, size-two bride. She dreamed of a body carved up on a warped plastic cutting board. A high school friend with whom she had maintained a painfully one-sided rivalry got a promotion at a rival marketing firm. She got into the satin sheets, scrolling through her feed with animal speed, and then reached up to feel the wings clipped to her hair, an idle habit—before realizing that she had no recollection of putting them in.

Within two weeks, everything else evaporated. The leave-in conditioner with the vaguely gamey scent, the pink toothpaste, the torturous floss, the layers of silicone and glycerin in different formulations. Each step disappeared down the drain, into the bog of her memory in her dog of a brain. Her perfect evening took place when she blinked and was completely ready for bed, with no memory whatsoever of performing any step of the nighttime routine. Her phone lay on the floor, half-concealed under a pile of laundry. For the first time in her adult life, something like contentment took her hand and promised to buoy her out of despair. Pyramids of moisturizer seeped into the skin of her face that night, and she rested deeply.

Another week passed before she realized that time was disappearing beyond the nighttime routine.

When I stepped off the train after my last day at my last job, the thought bubbled up from some vial of dark ether: “I would like to go get shit-faced.” This specific urge was new to me, though the feelings that motivated it were not. Endings make me melancholy. They twist my frame of mind into something that can no longer hold my portrait in place. The oily pigments of my painted face run all the way to the edges of the frame, and then drip onto the floor. Richly overdramatic purple, green olive, waxy pink. Pooling there, in a rainbow oil slick, under I can run my hand through—my fingertips, teardrops of wet, glassy pink, green, blue that, when mixed, go plummy, like basalt in the shadow of the sunset—and anoint myself anew.

Inside me, a bubble of glass is slowly growing. It expands until it sits right beneath my skin. I feel the membrane of glass against the membrane of my tissue, both surfaces engaged in gentle, exploratory contact. My cells worm their way around the intruder, probing the hard, transparent surface with their plasma-soaked limbs. Then the bubble breaches the boundaries of my body, painlessly. It now holds me within it, rather than vice versa. The air inside the bubble is both clear and cloudy, and I can see the path of the planets circumscribed around it. They flicker past me: spheres of old gold. Constellations that proceed on predetermined paths, that already know their futures. Saturn winks as he passes, teeth bared slightly in warning; I suppress a shiver of disgust.

My mother, the amateur astrologer, arrives via shooting star. She grabs my hand; she pulls me into her orbit, where she holds court in the cosmic theater. She convicts me, quickly, correctly, of the crime of cynicism, which springs eternally from a cup of bone embedded in my torso, irrigating my flesh like blood. In front of an unfeeling jury of my peers, hands folded against my gray tunic, I admit that my cynicism has been known to overcome me, has been known to erupt from my mouth and onto the inside walls of the bubble of glass. A gasp rises from the audience. “But is it not punishment enough,” I plead, “that I have to live with the thorn-shaped stains, crowning my vision forever?” My cynicism, beading on the glass like raindrops, is bile-green, ocean-blue, and streaked with daggers of red. It distorts the patterns of planets. Like torrid rain streaking against a windshield, it obscures my path forward. “No, it’s not enough,” says my mother, in her powdered wig, pounding her gavel with childlike glee. “You’re a danger to society and a corruptor of your own youth.”

As I am dragged away in heavy chains, I think: “My own—?”

I thought I was done writing about quitting my job. But it turns out that I’m still not done with that process. I feel it sitting in my mind like a stack of paperwork. The pages slip and float to the floor; their edges grow a pelt of dust. I retrieve them, sighing, and rearrange them into a more balanced configuration. No part of this endears me to the necessity of reading these twisted pages. “I don’t think I ever heard the reason you left,” a former colleague tells me over a final lunch. I raise a glass of water to my lips. I’ve rehearsed this answer a hundred times, and I’ve delivered it a hundred more times. I put the glass down a little more heavily than intended. “It was a timing thing,” I say. “Everything is about timing.” She nods, solicitously leaving any follow-up questions unasked. We both understand that I cannot be forthright about a place that we have both chosen—her, to stay; I, to leave.

Sometimes, I imagine how to tell her the truth. It begins with a fairytale about a lonely girl who grew into a confused woman. She was not a princess nor a beast. She was not Ariadne and not the Minotaur. Mundane in her mundanity. She was the granite that built the tower. She was the walls of the labyrinth. She was the on-call family therapist all throughout her childhood and adolescence. At the time, the role felt like a privilege, a natural outgrowth of emotional maturity, proof of preternatural wisdom. But she eventually came to understand that it had been an imposition, a form of deprivation, and that it was very possible—possibly inevitable—for a sensitive child to mistake adultness for a propensity for martyrdom. But old habits are hard to break and throughout her twenties she continued in the role, conducting daily relationship therapy between obstinate Minos and cruel Theseus, between Saturn and the painter, between image and frame, between bull and man, between desire and shadow. The most difficult of these was the duel between red-eyed cynicism and its ideological opposite—which was not quite optimism, nor hope, nor dream, but some union of the three that railed against the walls of the maze, fighting to prove that things could be different.

As she was locked in the cell, the keys jangling as the door closed behind her, she wondered: “That what could be different? That I—could be different? I—?”

From the window cut into the stone, optimism answered: “Yes. That you could be different.” (A muffled cry as, somewhere outside on the grass, optimism choked the air out of cynicism, preventing its rebuttal.)

Then, hope, sensing an opening, softly: “Not to mediate, but to create. Not to be underused, nor underestimated.”

Then, dream, with such purity of tone it induced her to crawl to the window frame as it rang out, like a bell: “To fight,”—she wedged her knee against the stone, scrambling for purchase, for a better view, to peer out into the light—”for the future of something you can’t yet name.”

Utterly perfect blue sky. The clouds have a touch of tangerine to their undersides. The freshness in a breath, the pale light—qualities in the air that never fail to remind me of new life. Springtime, here again.

Angelic blue in the morning. Light filtering in from the long, thin windows of the bedroom. Water boiling noisily for coffee. I disconnect and retreat into my mind, where everything is fallow land. Left uncultivated, this land has grown wildly, weirdly. I lack the awareness—or maybe the courage—necessary to weed it. So I relinquish the need to curate every thought and feeling I have. I give the budding flowers wide berth, out of deference to the dignity of their future beauty. Their tiny petals look cool to the touch. The fruit on the vine is pallid and misshapen but tender with promise. My phone is dead.

I watch an epic-in-the-making in my city’s biggest movie theater. I rest my chin in my hand. I resist the urge to tap a rhythm against the sticky floor. Why can nothing huge and mythic faze me anymore? The noon light shimmers hotly at my back when I raise my hand to knock at the doors of El Dorado—but then I pause. Fist in the air, I lower my hand. I return to the desert of my neighborhood and I wander its sidewalks under the gray sky, the green and ruby lights. A man smoking a cigarette almost runs me over with his bicycle. My mind is experiencing a drought. I find it impossible to be nourished by anything I read. Everything rolls off without absorption, as though the skin of my mind were coated in a layer of repellant. I kick at the rocks and feel something like comfort.

A holy night in spring. The moon is as full as longing is long. The air has a bite that never fails to remind me of my old life. My old life—neurosis like a gold rush, butterflies migrating up from my stomach to clog my veins. When Strawberry met my parents, he said to me: “I understand why you are the way you are now,” and I thought about my years kneeling by the river, panning stubbornly for gold, and forever finding bullets instead, stained brick red with my father’s blood. My old life—something I bury every winter and that will resurrect, without fail, in the breath of the following year in summer, a season of fireflies and vegetation, pain and forgiveness. “I understand why you are the way you are,” he said, and on that tree of knowledge I found the perfect fruit: the peace of closure. Tragic, infuriating but perversely validating, like a lesson learned twenty years too late. Now all that’s all left is for me to understand why I am the way that I am.

There’s no thread to this, I know. I knew before I started, because everything I write lately has this disconnected, restless spirit to it, like a bare path that meanders across a canal, under an overpass, above the clouds, through endless time. I cross swords with myself over and over. I win and I lose. I sit by the water and strum a few dissonant notes with calloused fingers and I hope that you will trust me, and that I will trust myself. Springtime, here again.

She took a week off work to search for the devil. (Technically, this was a violation of the PTO policy at her employer, but she knew Herbert in HR and she knew how to cry to him when necessary.) At the bus stop, her sunglasses flashing against the purpling light of the sunset, her arms crossed tightly over a cream-colored baby tee, she bared her teeth at the odious moon, the yellowing grass, the commuters who stared too long. Every gesture in her approximate direction seemed to her a provocation. Every stranger resembled an ex-boyfriend or an intolerable coworker. Her body itched uncontrollably.

Waiting for the devil at the bus stop failed to replicate their initial meeting-at-the-crossroads, so she turned to the digital crumb trail scattered across his Instagram stories. She followed him through a chain of venture capital-funded coworking spaces, then a suburban Walmart converted from an airplane hangar, then a Catholic seminary, where she was imprisoned for a full day and night after being mistaken for Satan’s accomplice (she ultimately escaped from a balconied window, teeth gritted, with the assistance of an undercover doctoral student posing as a nun and a rope of altar cloths knotted together like a rosary). She staked out the local DMV in a strip mall where the devil had an improbable appointment to renew his driver’s license. She hunted him around a tediously vapid nightclub, and then into a grimy alleyway across the street, where he dissolved into a pool of shadow, leaving her there in a cheap party dress, grasping only moonlight.

She finally pinned him down in the back of her city’s worst-rated Starbucks. He had a stickered MacBook balanced precariously on one knee. “Hey cool girl,” he said when he saw her, breezily, with real pleasure, as though they’d planned the rendezvous. He held her gaze as she slid into the seat opposite him.

“I can’t remember anything,” she said. The glass-top coffee table between them was fractured in three places. The rug underneath her feet was a kitschy stars-and-stripes pattern. “I’m losing actual time. I thought the agreement was just about the nighttime routine. Not about the whole day. Not my whole life.”

“You neglected to define the terms,” he said. “Who can say, after all, when nighttime begins and ends?”

“I feel like it has a pretty universally understood definition, asshole,” she said.

He shrugged, unperturbed. She stared at him. The music playing in the store—an EDM hit circa 2013, i.e., a prime cut of nostalgia bait, a selection from the liturgy of the pop music past—was slowly sending her into a froth of increasing despair.

Weakly, her breath catching in her throat like skin on a thorn, she said: “So I’ll just like, lose all time?” and he produced a toothy smile.

She had the distinct, oddly physical impression of being outside her body, of observing herself from outside herself. Not-her had a body of her own, and she sat at some distance, at an imaginary bar, ankles crossed at the lowest rung of a teak stool, nursing an espresso shot between her hands. The warm light glanced off her freshwater pearl earrings. From this vantage point, not-her could see the signs of her building panic attack, though not forestall it. Poor girl, not-her thought. A yikes situation, and it’s not even a good skin day for her.

“What am I supposed to do?” she asked. The devil gave her a look that suggested he was not impressed at this attempt to game the system.

“My dude,” he said, with an easy familiarity that succeeded in pissing her right off but also in derailing the incoming panic attack, “haven’t you seen ‘Click’ with Adam Sandler?”

“What? ‘Click’?” At the bar, not-her rolled her eyes at the reference. She quoted one of Christopher Walken’s lines at an imaginary bartender, playing with a pearl earring as she did, and they shared a companiable laugh. “Are you serious?”

“What can I say? I’m a 2000’s kid,” he said, pissing her off even more. “I hunger for the classics.”

“Shut up. You’re not a 2000’s kid. You’re like, I don’t know, a million years old.” Not-her turned on her stool and frowned pointedly, concerned that such obvious hyperbole made them seem uncultured. “Wait, how old are you?”

He brushed the question away. “Can I get you a coffee?” he asked, in a tone that could almost pass for affectionate. “A mint, uh, Frappuccino? A frankincense spritz?”

“Are you flirting with me?” she asked. Before he could reply, she shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t support Starbucks. I take issue with the lack of transparency in their supply chain.” Not-her nodded in vigorous agreement; the bartender clapped approvingly at this show of virtue.

The devil snort-laughed into the sleeve of his sweater. “What’s so funny?” she asked, indignant.

“Everything,” he said, voice muffled by the sleeve. “Everything is just hysterical.”

She kicked at the leg of the coffee table between them, half-wincing when the blow made harsher contact than intended.

“You know, you can usually fix this sort of thing,” he said.

“That’s a bit cryptic,” she said, sourly.

“I mean, you can work with the technicality of it,” he said. “I’m not usually this helpful. I’d be grateful, if I were you.”

“I wouldn’t describe you as helpful, really.”

His eyes returned to the MacBook screen with a finality that suggested he was done with dealing with her. “The Lord helps those who help themselves,” he said, by way of farewell, expressionless in the wan light of the computer screen.

That night, at seven forty-five in the evening, she unplugged her phone from where it lay charging on the hardwood floor. The dark screen came instantly to life and she swiped along its surface, trawling. She navigated to a two-hour, springtime Tibetan monastery soundscape video, complete with photorealistic Himalayan mountains and an endless parade of cartoonish, red-robed monks fluttering across a petal-strewn path. She propped her phone screen up over her dryer, where she could see it as the need for spiritual consolation arose. Then, theatrically, she threw open her bathroom cabinet doors, ignoring the squeaky sound of their rusted hinges. She arranged her products one-by-one in a circle around her sink, like a crowd of penitents leaning over a scrying pool. Her lotions, balms and potions held their breaths in anticipation of an unknown ritual. Not-her poked her head in through the open door. Her face was beautifully made-up. Her body was hidden underneath a peach-patterned terrycloth robe.

She selected the first bottle—baby pink, filled with a cloudy liquid indistinguishable from tinged water, manufactured in a country that recalled vaguely tropical associations. It trembled in her hand. Lo-fi, monkish drone-singing urged her forward. She popped the cap open and, before she could rethink the decision (“The excess! The expense!” cried not-her, realizing now what was to come), began emptying its contents into dirty bowl of the sink. The stench of cheaply-formulated synthetic rose filled the room and she registered the foulness of it with pleasure, as the first stage of her long penance.

The last drop of violet-colored body oil gurgled loudly down the gunky gullet of her bathroom sink. She chased it with half a bottle of drain cleaner and then sat down, heavily, on the marble-patterned laminate. The temperature inside her felt like it had dropped by a hundred degrees, as though she herself were plummeting down a rockface, into an endless crevasse below. She pictured not-her, falling headfirst through freezing air, blue velvet heels abandoned on the ice. She pressed her closed eyes to the peeling paper of her bathroom cabinet. She counted each full breath.

That night, she dreamed of the products she had made disappear. The slimy, clinical-grade serums, the moisturizers that left a film of sparkle on her hairline, the potions for her persistent frizz, her boxcar scars, the broken veins visible across her neck. They spoke in her dead mother’s voice and told her dark family secrets that she did not remember upon waking but that lingered like grease on her hands. The smell in her apartment made her sick to her stomach as she took apart the instruments of the routine, scattering their remains on a piece of old newspaper. The imitation jade roller was mostly plastic. The Korean towel was easily cut into pieces with safety scissors. The UV light mask was impenetrable, even after significant prodding with a screwdriver; she left it whole, its eye holes staring up at her, its mouth hole aghast. She wrapped up the newspaper and hid the evidence in a corner of her closet.

She was unsure, at first, if by destroying her collection, her hand raised like a sword aflame, she had definitively killed the deal. But when night rolled around and she was still there, alone with her maze of thoughts, her skin a dry pelt over her face, she knew. Her time was hers again. Mind abuzz, hair uncombed, she climbed into the sheets. Her arms and legs felt like sweaty deli meat, which she tried her best to ignore. She could feel her curls matting at the nape of her neck. Something in her groaned like an Eldritch horror of the deep, and she choked it into submission.

She woke feeling like she had overslept by hours, or possibly even days. That feeling was there again when she woke up the next morning, and then the next. It was like the hours were sponges, expanding while she slept. She imagined time poised over her sleeping body like a vampire, engorging itself on her blood plasma. She decided to test a theory. She sat on her kitchen floor as the evening cooled into night, her eyes glued to the deadpan faces of three different alarm clocks. At precisely midnight, time stopped across the trio of faces. She started a timer on her iPhone. Time stayed stopped for the following forty-two minutes—the length of her old nighttime routine. She had married her products to the sewage; she had found an exploit in the language of the original deal and followed it to salvation. She had clawed back her time—no, she’d done more than that. She was gaining new time.

Forty-two minutes, every night. In this span of freshly uncovered time, she could walk the streets of her neighborhood, entirely unmolested by sensation. The moon cast a spotlight on her as she walked. The tundra of her mind was not silent, but it stayed quiet enough. The tar of the road was littered with specks of glass, but she could roam barefoot with no consequences. She did not need to tread carefully. Cleanliness and integrity were not her concern. Between 12:00am and 12:42am, she felt as mighty and as eternal as night itself.

(She learned, however, to be back in her room, in her bed, when real time started again. In the transition between the two forms of time, something cracked in the world. Something was briefly allowed in. One night when she nearly left her return too late, she glanced back toward the street as she twisted the doorknob and witnessed a profanity, a divinity—a huge angel with a red body and red eyes standing astride the horizon, the fingers of its right hand finding purchase on the crags of the moon, its left hand beginning to peel back the skin of the sky. She could taste, in the back of her mouth—)

On the fifth night of her wandering, she met the devil under a flickering streetlight. She almost laughed at how prosaic this was. An encounter even she could have scripted.

“Hi, cool girl,” he said. He smiled at her blandly, but expectantly, like she was responsible for his presence there. It annoyed her until she realized that it meant she had won.

The world of night bent softly around them as they walked the empty streets. Shadows bowed. The moon on her throne went briefly dark, as though in obeisance.

“This is pretty cool,” she said. “Yeah,” he agreed.

She decided, in her infinite dignity, to be gracious. “You were right about the technicality. I suppose I should thank you for that.”

He shrugged. “I would advise against thanking me for anything.”

She glanced at her iPhone. Its screen shone in the darkness like a prized pearl. Ten minutes left. “Was it a lesson?” she asked, “What you did to me?”

He paused meaningfully before answering. “Nothing is a lesson,” he said, finally.

“Nothing is a lesson?”

“Nothing in your life is designed to teach you anything.” He must have noticed her dismay, because he quickly added: “Though I guess I could say it was something to do with consumerism, and beauty standards, and obsessive compulsion masquerading as self-care.”

“Not a lasting lesson, then,” she said, with a laugh that she hoped sounded light and pretty, but also cruel, cynical. “I am perfectly capable of finding another compulsion. I can always order clothes from an app, for example. Or start a podcast about like, digital marketing. Or hoard nail polish.”

“Infinite possibilities,” he said.

“Infinite possibilities,” she agreed, as she turned to lead him home.

It’s finally warm enough outside that opening the windows is a pleasure. On the lap of the breeze, a trio arrive, fine gossamer against the window pane: light, warmth, and some third thing only circulating air can generate. Brio, maybe. There are three weeks between my birthday and my brother’s and, in that interim time, cool, blue spring becomes honeyed, temperate spring. Dogs nose at the ground. Insects return to their kingdom. I try to extract the big plastic box of summer clothing from the closet and clumsily tip over onto the bed in the process. In that pool of sheets, warmed by rays of light from the westerly path of the sun, I feel a bit like Thumbelina, aimless but not altogether lost, in her green-amber nest of barley.

I am deep in the contractual weeds with a possible new employer. While we trade emails across the ocean, I continue to spend the days freely. I try not to think about the cost of each labor hour in terms of lost salary. I try not to engage in hypotheticals or counterfactuals or any other instruments of speculation. Instead, I do my best to think of these developments with as much neutrality as possible. My life was not a bad life when I was gainfully employed. It was nevertheless the right choice to leave when I left. This sabbatical is not entirely stress-free. It is nevertheless a treasure, a pearl of time that is mine to use as I wish. I repeat these things like a prayer until they stick not on my skin, not on my soul, but some third surface in between.

I read. I don’t read. I write. I don’t write. Right, wrong, and some third thing. When the wind whistles through with the windows open, Strawberry’s windchime—a forest-green bell of cast iron, with a cerulean-blue tongue—cries out in a single clear note, and spring, invisible, blurry, inchoate, comes to distinctive, blushing life, signaling the true end of the frost. How easily noise filters into sound when we tune our ear in its favor.