Looking out the window at angry green skies, searching for the lake amidst the drops, I ask her, “Do you ever feel like you died and someone forgot to tell you?”

Some mornings feel like promise and new beginnings. Others feel like there’s a few people—a dozen, if it’s fresh—standing around my hospital bed begging me to wake up, wake up, wake up.

She orders at-home fluids to treat her chronic migraines. “I hope the nurse is hot,” she laughs. “I saw this on The Kardashians,” I reply to the selfie with an IV needle in her arm.

As the dock sways back and forth and I wax poetic about the calming properties of chlorophyll, I announce that it feels like Ozark today.

There’s a new vine wrapping around the post of the deck, and I wonder how long it’s taken to grow so tall. “At least three summers,” I answer myself. No, that can’t be right.

“How long has it been? Time is so weird,” the doctor laughs.

The difference between life and sleep and death is thinnest here.

I lay on the dock, searching for the lake amidst the drops. Give up and close my eyes, count backwards from 3, 2, 1… wake up.