When Susannah suggested we try summoning a demon, I went along with it because even though I knew perfectly well not to fuck with Ouija boards, I knew even better not to fuck with Susannah when she had her mind made up. I'd seen her not talk to friends for weeks if they ignored one of her texts; she'd once shunned a freshman in the dining hall for a month because he didn't like a joke she'd made. I'd seen her sweet-talk her way up a letter grade more than once, and she'd gotten me to go out every night during finals week sophomore year. She told me she'd made a PowerPoint to convince her parents to buy her a cell phone when she was ten. If you refused, her big, child-like eyes would crinkle at the corners, and her mouth would pucker, and she'd say no, it was fine, but you'd both know it wasn't.
       She said we were only going to ask for a minor demon, one who could help us with our homework and harangue our exes. Maybe call up a lightning storm for the fun of it. Nothing earth-shaking or world-changing or apocalypse-starting, just some light occultism. She didn't seem too bothered about the prospect of welcoming an ancient, probably unfriendly demonic force into our lives.
       "You worry too much," she told me. "It'll be fun. Like The Craft."
       "You've seen The Craft, right? They torture each other with snakes and get their powers taken away."
       (We both knew she'd seen it; we'd watched it together last Halloween, curled up in piles of blankets on the cheap sofa in her apartment, candles flickering on the mantlepiece, popcorn strewn at our feet. She probably fell asleep halfway in when it was still a feel-good empowerment romp.)

       I meet her at midnight across campus under the yawning stone arch of Adler Hall, our faces half-shielded in the light of the courtyard's street lamps. Adler used to be a dorm; now it's the music building, and she chose it because it's the oldest, scariest building on campus and has large, warped windows that you can jimmy open after dark. We like to tell the new freshmen that someone was murdered in one of its third-floor bathrooms back in the thirties, even though we have no proof. It is the kind of building that wants to be haunted, and I'm sure it would figure out how to make its own ghosts if it couldn't get them the usual way.
       True or not, Adler freaks me out, and I try to avoid it at all costs. But Susannah insisted. Her apartment wouldn't do, she said, because the atmosphere wasn't right and, besides, everyone broke into the music building at least once, so it really wasn't a big deal. I still lived in the dorms, and accidentally getting your RA possessed was probably outside the bounds of the housing contract. She very proudly showed me the Ouija board she'd picked up at a thrift shop downtown. Which meant it was definitely pre-cursed, but it also only cost eight dollars.
       The board tucked under her arm now, she climbs onto the windowsill nearest the door and, with a few carefully angled yanks, forces it open. She slides inside, her skirt catching on the sill as she tumbles into near-darkness. I slip in behind her.
       The window lands us in the entrance hall, and by the streetlight and moonlight and glow of the red exit sign, I can just make out the mural: instruments, musicians, gods of song and dance, painted by some famous artist a hundred or so years ago. They are faded and chipped now, half-covered in flyers, noticeboards, and posters for concerts from last January. In the far corner, above the staircase, is a young man with a violin. There is a long crack down his painted face, and even now, in this half-light, his eyes are alarmingly green. He is only smiling at me because I am thinking about ghosts, and I am only thinking about ghosts because Susannah has decided she would rather practice black magic than do her physics homework. I return his gaze, but I don't smile.
       Guided by our phone flashlights, we step into a windowless practice room. Susannah shuts the door, and motion-activated fluorescents flicker on overhead. They ruin the aesthetic, but we cannot turn them off.
       We sit cross-legged on the floor in the shadow of the upright piano. My dress is too short for this, and I'm glad I thought to wear the thick black tights. Susannah insisted we wear dresses because she is a gorgeous cliché and real witches summon in style, but it's unseasonably cold, and all I can think about are the oversized sweatpants waiting for me in my room.
       Susannah lays the board and a notebook between us. "Did you bring the candles?"
       I pull a Michael's bag from my backpack and add it to the pile. Twelve orange pillar candles bought on post-Halloween clearance. I tried to get some red wine, too, but all I could come up with was the pink Barefoot Moscato, so I guess we'll have to work with that.
       She grunts something that sounds like disapproval and sets the candles out in a circle around us. She will also use a knife, a bell, a plastic cup stolen from the dining hall, and her roommate's cigarette lighter. She does not tell me how the summoning will work, and I don't think I want to know. A few weeks ago, when she first got the idea, she left a book of Historical Black Magick checked out from the library outside my door. It smelled of rust and fire, and I decided it was probably best not to read it. I would be here for the ride to make sure that someone was there to tell the paper when she died, but I would not perform any spells myself so long as I could help it. If she got herself possessed or dragged into some netherworld, it would be her own fault.
        "Okay," she says after a moment, thumbing the lighter. "Let's conjure ourselves a demon."
       "Wait, wait--hold on," I say. I dig into my backpack again, pulling out two cheap polyester witches' hats. "Party City. Gotta look the part if we're going to do this right." I toss one at her, and its brim knocks over a candle.
       "Lily."
       "What?" I put on my hat. It hangs crooked over my forehead and pinches my ears. Not a single costume hat has ever been designed with the human head in mind.
       Susannah doesn't reply, but she fixes the candle and puts on her hat; its point slouches tiredly to the left. Her eyes and mouth are doing that crinkly thing, and I think I'm supposed to tell her not to worry. I'll take this seriously. I'll keep her safe.
       I lean back against the wall, eyeing the half-empty bottle of wine. Will she notice if I drink some? Will intoxication better open the metaphysical pathways or whatever it is we're doing, or will it mean we dial the wrong number and get sent straight to Satan's personal line? I decide against it. For now.
       "So, how does this work?" I ask.
       "Didn't you read the book?"
       "I had a Latin midterm." I watch her draw a chalk circle between the candles, connect them with straight lines, a sort of collapsed starburst. "Just tell me what to do whenever you're ready."
       One by one, she lights the candles. They don't flicker; they beam straight and tall and over-bright in the airless, sterile room. There is something more frightening in their confidence, redundancy, and lack of shadows under the harsh lights than if they had been illuminating the total darkness. Susannah waves me into the circle, hissing, don't smudge the chalk, touching up the smudges where I stepped. She lays the Ouija board between us, bell and wine beside it.
       The knife is in her hand. It looks like a steak knife, recently sharpened, its blade serrated and cruel.
       "Okay," she says. Quickly, barely wincing, she cuts across the tip of her ring finger, flicking dark spots of blood between the candles, on the planchette, in the wine. She sticks her finger in her mouth and digs into her pocket, pulling out a pair of Disney Princess Band-Aids. "Your turn."
       I breathe in slowly, my stomach hitching into my chest. She knows how I feel about blood. Still, we've come this far. I shut my eyes and turn away, but I hold out my hand towards her, only swear once as the jagged blade rips apart my skin, as she guides my blood around the circle, wraps a bandage around the wound. When I look back, the faces of Elsa and Anna smile up from where she's sliced us open.
       She sits back on her heels and looks up at me with a smile. "There. Now he knows we're here."
       "How do you know it's a he?"
       "I don't know. Demons just feel like a male sort of thing."
       "Maybe he's a she. Or an it. Or both. Or neither. I don't know."
       "We'll find out when he gets here."
       "Or she."
       "Whatever."
       She places her hands on the planchette, and I follow. It's warm and sticky with our blood, humming with want. There's something alive, something familiar, something friendly, something frightening about it, and my fingers relax against the scratched plastic.
       It doesn't move; we don't ask it questions, but I feel it. Hello, it says.
       It is a soundless sound, an echo without a source. It is deep and guttural, and the sound of my own voice inside my head and like no voice I have ever heard before. It is nothing like a human voice; its words are not words so much as an unshakeable force wrapping tendrils around the base of my skull. It settles itself into my interior monologue, forms the shapes of English in a way that I can tell is not English at all.
       Who are you? I ask it.
       Here to help.
       Are you a demon?
       If you'd like.
       Susannah looks at me, frowning. "Nothing's happening," she says.
       She must not hear it--but she wouldn't hear it. This is not hearing. This is a sensation, an experience. I have never been religious. I was raised carefully, fashionably agnostic, to believe in the smudgy imprints of people left behind. This must be what it's like to sit in church and understand yourself as connected to something ancient, overwhelming, and holy. I am horrified; I am delighted.
       The planchette quivers under my touch. Not for her.
       Why?
       The planchette doesn't want to answer me, and I pull my hands away. They're angry and red where I'd touched it.
       "Lily, what's going on?"
       When I try to open my mouth, I find my lips have sealed themselves shut. My tongue is leaden, my throat constricted. I work out something like a strangled groan. In the back of my head, somewhere, nowhere, everywhere, the thing comforts me. There's a hand on my shoulder, stroking my hair, a warmth inside my bones. I smell rotting flowers and my mother's perfume.
       It opens my mouth, and I let it. "I guess it didn't work."

       Susannah insists we try again, and we sit and stare at the board for the better part of the next hour, asking it question after question as if it will make a difference, but nothing happens, or whatever has happened has happened, or my new friend keeps anything from happening. It sits quietly inside of me, patiently. It does not try to speak again. I almost forget that it is there.
       When we do finally leave Adler, we walk back in silence. The look Susannah gives me is charged, and it occurs to me that she thinks this is my fault, that I intentionally sabotaged her grand plans, and every inch of my body wants to apologize. But lips hold closed, and my tongue grows heavy against my teeth, numb and unyielding. My eyes lock straight ahead, watching the stars fight the street lights and clouds for a moment of clarity; my fingers unfurl themselves every time I clench them into fists, spidering their way into my coat pockets, taking inventory: keys, lip balm, cell phone, headphones.
       It decides it wants to listen to a podcast and leaves Susannah fuming as punchy music gives way to real stories from real people live on stage! It shivers, I shiver, we shiver together for the first time. It seems to like The Moth.
        My face is cold and wet and stinging, and I cannot see it, but I imagine hers is too.
       I turn off first; my dorm is closer than her apartment, and we do not look at each other as I go. I walk to the heavy doors to tap myself into the building, climb up the stairs, and trudge down the hall, my head pounding with the weight of its new tenant. My dorm room, the last one on the left, is smaller than I remember. It was never large, but it was surprisingly comfortable.
       Now it is suffocating. I do not see how the twin bed can contain my body, how I do not hit my head on the ceiling every time I sit up. I have been living in a shoebox, I realize. I had just never noticed it. I pull up my blinds and open the window as far as it will go, but there is still the matter of the screen bolted into place. My demon wants to reach into the night air, to breathe an expansive space. It hates the screen, taunting us with its almost-freedom. I could take the Leatherman out of my desk drawer, cut it away, forfeit my security deposit, risk falling to my death.
       No. The window is narrow, the breeze achingly cold, but it will have to do.
       I press my face to the screen, breathe fully for a moment, and marvel at the capacity of my lungs. I didn't know you could taste the night air. Beyond the metal and paint, there is greenery and dark, gasoline and starlight, the dying leaves of the trees on the quad, the collective exhalation of every person in this city. My demon has been quiet; it must be breathing too.
       Do you have a name? I ask it.
       I am you.
       Can I call you Karen? No. Bartholomew?
       Stop.
       I am deliriously tired. That's all.
       I leave the window open, but I shut the blinds and peel myself out of my dress. It comes away damp with sweat, smelling of what I assume is fire and brimstone but can only describe as rank. The dress was my sister's; not expensive, but pretty and comfortable. I stole it from her closet when she left for college because I'd wanted a dress with pockets, and she didn't seem to care. It bypasses my laundry basket and lands straight in the trash can.

       I sleep more deeply that night than I have in years, dark and dreamless. I had started to accept sleeplessness, the clanging of my own voice as it careened around the inside of my head. The white noise machine helps, sometimes, as do the sleeping pills, but I've learned to work with the constant stinging in my eyes and the weight of my head. I am always tired, I tell people, always wishing I could take a nap, but I hate sleeping; I never do. The dreamscapes are strange and sharp and a little off-color--too bright or too dark, I can never tell. They're not real, I know that, but they're nearly close enough to fool me. Nights are spent in a maddening cycle of separating the true from the false, the waking from the dreaming, and most days I awake more tired than when I began.
       This is the first time I have ever had a total release from my own thoughts and can instead allow the relief of complete and total nothingness to envelop me entirely.

       The first day with my demon, I am beautiful. Nothing has changed, but it is taken with our body, trembling when it catches our reflection--in mirrors, in windows, in the murky, algae-dotted surface of the pond. My eyes are clearer and brighter, my hair soft and clean, the freckles that constellated the bridge of my nose charming instead of childish.
       It has decided we are the most perfect creature in the universe and spends hours massaging my ego. I wonder what it will think when it realizes the limitations of human limbs, how quickly we tire, how strawberries make me swell, and I cannot reach things on the top shelf. It doesn't seem to matter; for an entire day, my back does not ache under the weight of my textbooks, my feet don't blister in the pinchy mules it has taken a liking to.
       Do you have an other? It asks me.
       A what?
       A partner. A second one.
       Oh, you mean a boyfriend. No, it's just you.
       Why?
       I don't know.
       Would you like one?
       I don't know.
       It does not ask again, but I feel it hum as it begins rooting around in the depths of my mind for the checklist of exes: Chloe and Peter and the nameless few in the dark corners of parties my first year. This seems to preoccupy it for a whole day, maybe two, and sometimes the memories slip its grasp. They resurface, sudden jolts of faces, of voices, of the feeling of once-familiar hands on my skin, and I tell it to leave them alone. It will for moments, but they always come back.

       My demon doesn't like my classes. Biology is useless, it tells me, elementary Latin is child's play. It spends most of Gothic Lit staring at the back of Oliver McKinney's neck, hypnotized by the soft curls of his hair and the freckles poking out from the collar of his sweater. I try to tell it that Oliver is off-limits; he went on a date with Susannah in October and told her to her face that he "didn't see it going anywhere" and "didn't want to lead her on," so he was capital-B-Bad. It doesn't seem to care. If anything, the taboo invigorates it. I think it knows she would drop me on the spot if she saw me with him. I think it likes this.
       I can't keep it from rifling through my thoughts, so it must know that, yes, maybe, I have been staring at Oliver since long before it took up residence, and, maybe, that I had perversely hoped that he had would ask me out, before Susannah got to him first. He'd smiled at me in the library once. That had to count for something.
       One morning, it drops my pen off my desk with a clatter. Oliver turns around, stares at me. My demon waves. I blush furiously.
       I don't want this, I tell it.

        It does my homework for me. We sit at my desk, and it conjugates verbs. Its translations always seem to come out a bit morbid, and it prefers Medieval church Latin, which annoys my professor, but it has careful, spindly handwriting, and, as it works, I get to take a rest and think about The Bachelor. I am still not sure how best to explain why my fingers are always smudged with ink, why I've suddenly become left-handed. No one seems to have noticed, and I am starting to hope that they won't.
       I don't know if I'm possessed. My demon won't tell me, but I let it wander around in my mind, picking open the cabinets and looking under the shelves. When it finds something it likes--starlight, swimming, the first girl I kissed, the time I bit a boy in preschool--it purrs, and the hair on our body shivers with gooseflesh. It finds the early moments with Susannah, too, her picking me out of the house lounge, quiet and friendless. It finds the first times we baked together in the dorm kitchen, when we played board games with friends, when she took me to parties and made me feel loved, powerful for being in her orbit. It finds the first times I felt whole, like I was part of something larger than myself. It skips the bad stuff; I think it already knows.
       I don't know what happens when something displeases it, but there have been headaches and nightmares, and I cannot remember most of second grade. I remember I dated someone once, a girl, maybe a boy, but their faces are fuzzy and indistinct. I think it might be dusting out the corners of my memory, clearing the past to make room for itself, but every time I try to fear it, it sweeps that away, too.
       What are you doing? I ask it.
       Making you strong.
       I have decided not to fight its housekeeping; I don't think it would let me.
       It sticks on one particular memory: December, last year, back in my dorm after Winter Formal. I wear Susannah's dress, which is velvet and backless and clings to me in a way I hadn't realized dresses could. My feet are blistered from a night of heels. The heater is broken, and my exposed skin is so cold, and I don't know where Susannah is. We were both in line for our coats, and then she was cutting ahead to talk to some of the boys who live upstairs, and then they were heading outside into the frozen night. She didn't answer my texts, and I trudged across campus back to my room to sit shivering on the worn carpet. There's more to the story than this, I'm sure of it, but I can't find it. My demon has sanded down the edges and pared away the excess. The narrative is clean now--abandonment, betrayal. I wonder what it used to be.

       Susannah doesn't talk to me for the better part of a month because she has decided her failed séance was a disaster and entirely my fault--she doesn't tell me outright, but she doesn't need to; I've seen her do this enough times before. She's never done it for this long, though. It's usually just a few days, a week tops. The séance must have really meant something to her, and I want to ask what, I want to ask why, want to know what I ruined for her. Before, I would have done anything to make it up to her, but my demon doesn't like me thinking that way. Instead, it leaves her to sulk, to stalk around and ignore me in the library. We are in line for coffee together one afternoon, and we make eye contact--terse, fleeting--when she reaches for her chai latte before turning away so quickly it splashes her. I hear her swearing to herself as she walks out. The voice in my head shivers.
       Why do you hate her so much? I ask it.
       I don't.
       You're in my head. You can't lie to me. I don't know if it's true, but I hope it is. I don't want to think about the idea of a supernatural being keeping secrets from my own body.
       I pity her.
       I've heard a lot of things about Susannah, but I have never heard someone pity her before. When I ask the demon why, it doesn't respond. If anything, I had expected it to pity me, the lackey, the yes-woman, a paper kite left crumpled in her cyclone. I had learned a long time ago to just smile and let her play the victim in whatever story she chose, agree and avoid whoever she'd decided was Bad that week. Maybe, I think for the first time. Maybe she had been the problem after all, not them. Maybe if everyone you meet is Bad, they're not the ones making the messes. Suddenly, she seems an awful lot smaller, and my world feels much bigger.

       We go to a house party that weekend, my demon reveling in the feeling of fresh air on our bare skin in my strappy little top. It is in a basement, dark and sweaty and full, not too large and not too late, but the floor is already sticky and the music already too loud. I cannot remember the last time I went to a party--Halloween, probably. I don't do well in crowds; I feel my skin crawl and my head spin, and I focus on my breathing. There's a plastic cup in my hand that I don't remember getting, but it is half-full and has LILY scrawled on it in Sharpie. It is the demon's handwriting.
       I'd like to get better at parties, I think. It feels like a skill worth learning before I graduate. The demon is charismatic, and it has studied my memories. It knows who to talk to, who to avoid, and it plays nice until I decide to just sit back and watch it work. Watching your own body from afar is a strange feeling, like those VR horror films that were popular back in the day. Everything is a half-step removed, your field of vision only as much as the directors thought to render, and, not thinking about the words, you have time to hate the sound of your own voice. But I have let this thing in, and it has promised to help me. I would sigh, but I no longer need my lungs.
       And then, of course, in a move that anyone could have seen coming from outer space, it finds Oliver tucked in a corner with friends. He is not wearing a sweater today. He would be crazy to; it is hot with the crush of human bodies, so his arms are bare, his t-shirt clings to his chest. My demon has good taste, I'll give it that. When it kisses him, he makes a little oh noise and relaxes into us, and it shivers, and whatever part of me is still left in my body seizes up.
       I think my demon is a better kisser than I ever was. It is getting used to this shape; it has studied every muscle, learned how to wield the fragile, breakable skin as a weapon. It has turned one kiss into a shotgun blast. I can't see Oliver's face because my demon has closed our eyes, but he tastes like Sprite and Chapstick, and I imagine he must be as confused as I am, blindly watching my body kiss a boy in the dark corner of a poorly-ventilated room. I hope it scares him a little, like it scares me. I hope it thrills him, too.
       I wonder if Susannah is here. I wonder if she knows.

       On a Tuesday, my demon and I sit on the quad and watch her walk past, frowning and disheveled, her heavy makeup barely hiding the dark rings under her eyes, and we laugh, wondering why she was ever so important. Even now, she's magnetic, but my demon gladly points out the weak spots in her force field. I think I miss her, and I find myself reaching to text her several times I day, to send memes or cat pictures, or you'll never believe what happened this weekend! My hands cramp up each time, the fingers tap on delete until every character is wiped from view until Messenger closes, and the battery spontaneously dies.
       Don't worry about her.
       But I do.
       On Friday, she texts me first. Her Bitmoji, a tiny blonde cartoon, its eyes comically large, waving from atop an elephant. SORRY. try again?
       Does she mean another séance? Our friendship? A different ritual? Once upon a time, I would have said yes, because I didn't have a choice. I think I am about to say yes again, and I pause, and my phone vibrates again.
       okay. She sends a pouty face emoji. Then three dots, blinking for too long. She is responding to a message I did not write and don't remember sending, but there it is in its big blue bubble, as real as any other:
       sorry, no.
       I've never texted with periods before. Neither of us do; we have fallen prey to the beautiful, casual chaos of continuous lowercase words, punctuated with the occasional frowny face or exclamation point for dramatic effect. I'm partial to double question marks to show my fallibility, to let her know that I am by no means an authority, that I'm pliable and open to suggestion. She only uses them for real questions or to make me agree that she is right. A period is beyond passive-aggressive. It's aggressive-aggressive. We both know that. My throat is constricting, and I think this might be it. We're past the point of no return, and Susannah is going to murder me in my sleep.
       And then my phone lights up with another alert.
       movie night instead? 8ish my place?
       Perfect.
       My demon is laughing. It is gloating. It shivers in a way it never has before. It makes me shiver, a reflex that I thought it had pushed out of me.
       What are you doing? I ask it, even though I know. I know how these kinds of stories end.
       Don't worry about it.

       Susannah looks at us strangely when we arrive, probably because we used the buzzer instead of texting. Her buzzer doesn't work. It never has, just makes a horrible siren sound without unlocking anything, and she still has to run down three flights of stairs to let us in. The rule has always been text when you're here!! to spare everyone the trauma of its wailing. Of all people, I should know this, but my demon is enjoying its use of our hands tonight.
       She runs up the stairs ahead of us, feet bare against the worn carpet. She's wearing pajamas, the silky set with the roses embroidered on the chest. Her hair is done up loosely in a scrunchie, and her face is bare and red. She doesn't say anything to us on the way up, but she hums to herself. This is the last time I will see her like this, I think.
       I throw my coat on her couch and say, "I'm sorry," while my demon is still preoccupied with the concept of a college apartment. Peeling paint, string lights, a careening tower of recycling by the kitchen door. It is too confused by the windowsill of dead succulents to stop me, but there is a quick ringing in my ears, monumental and echoing, and my vision cuts in and out with static. I can't open our mouth, can't nod our head, can't move our hands, can't do anything but breathe and stare and feel it subsume me.
       It heard me, and it's not happy.
       I've got this, it says.
       I watch what happens next as if from underwater. The ringing gives way to muffled half-silence; the static fades. They make small talk, I think. Classes, parents, the boy who lives downstairs, her roommates, who are currently out who-knows-where doing god-knows-what. She makes popcorn, pulls up Netflix, grabs some beers from the fridge. My demon passes on the beer and the Disney movies, which is both out of character for me and in poor taste. I would chide it, but it isn't listening. It has tuned me out, silenced my own thoughts. It is barely even trying to be me anymore. It's gotten comfortable. It's raided my memories, it knows what I've seen and what I like, and it wants something bloodier, more exciting, more fun.
       I cannot see her clearly, but Susannah makes a face when it picks a slasher, and she says something that I guess must be, but you hate horror movies, though it sounds like the strange, tinny waves of my white noise machine. Artificially rhythmic, simulated, too distorted to be real.
       The demon lets me watch the movie over its shoulder, even as I tell it that, no, I'd really rather not, I don't do well with blood. The room is still rippling and distant; the picture on the tiny screen reminds me of my nightmares from high school, no faces, no narrative, no words. Unfocused images of violence convalesce into a kaleidoscopic hellscape, unified only in their uncanny ability to nauseate. The demon seems to register my discomfort and allows me back into my senses, so I can experience madness in high-definition surround sound.
       We sit on opposite ends of the couch, and halfway through, Susannah leans back and props her legs up on my lap. "I saw you with Oliver," she says, and takes another sip of beer.
       "So what," says the demon. I despise the sound of my voice in its mouth.
       I imagine her eye twitching. I imagine her face turning red. I imagine her pulling at her hair, gritting her teeth, breaking out in hives. In whatever is left of me, I imagine her melting on the spot, sloughing off the couch like a puddle, and I don't hate it. The demon won't look at her; instead, it slides me back underwater, safely tucked out of the way.
       I realize I don't remember how we got to Susannah's. I can picture the walk, I've done it a million times before, but I don't remember this specific walk this specific night. I was in my room, then I was here, at the door, on her couch. I don't remember putting on my coat or picking out these shoes, or packing a tote bag. That must be the longest the demon has kept me away from my body; I wonder where I went.
       The demon is soothing me into silence, coaxing me into sleep, pushing me further and further from our body, from this room, until I see nothing but a distant pinprick of light above the waves and hear only the roar of the ocean in my bones.
       Rest now, it tells me.

       I am alone on a beach. The sky is stark, sterile white. The sand is silver, the ocean bubbles with red and green spots of light. The waves are still, but I hear them crashing, big and small and big and small and big and small; I hear birds screeching their metallic screeches, though the paper-white sky is empty. In the distance, a lighthouse cuts a dark sliver out of the horizon. I walk towards it, but it never gets closer. The silver sand burns my feet, rubbing them raw and angry, and the waves crash on and on and on and on. Caw, the birds say. Caw.
       Somewhere overhead, there are two girls on a sagging couch in a poorly-lit living room. Here, I walk off the sand into the cool, empty water, lay down, and fade into sleep.