A year, a whole fucking year. Felt like a decade, but at the same time it felt like the months had all spontaneously combusted, like it was just yesterday that I’d watched Sam’s eyes close. Grey eyes. Brown hair, just like mine. Body diminished into something less than a body. Hollow, weightless, like a bird’s. I could imagine the wind from an open window, he’d asked us to open the window, and I could see the breeze carrying him in its hands, lifting him up, suspending him in motion. I’d wished it would. The wind had my permission to lift my brother from his bed at Mount Sinai, hospital gown and all, and fly him through the window and into the thick orange sky.

***

All the Bedloe’s have some kind of tick. Mine were more sensory – rubbing my face, running my hands through my hair, biting my inner cheek. Adderall makes the ticks come to the surface more, but it also gets me out of bed and helps me sort through the incongruent thoughts, loading them all like small lead pellets into a single shotgun shell. Regulates the headiness of my head. Makes me forget the tiredness in my bones, keeps my boots on my feet, my shirt on my chest, everything in its order, place, fitting the mold I have to fit in order to be a cell in this sea-dwelling organism, Manhattan, to live in my shoe box with its water stains, to take Shay out to dinner now and then, to keep the freezer stocked with middle-tier gin and limes in the fridge and splurge on the $4 organic, mocha, cold-brew, fair-trade, cruelty-free, half-caff, sugar-free, caramel swirl, micro-brewed, iced coffee.