And she licks rainwater from the palm of her hand. And she has that moon-eyed laugh. And she never wears any kind of shoe, no matter what the weather's doing. And she sprinkles menstrual blood over the spider plant's soil. And she puts her rent in a lavender envelope on the fridge under the Dollywood magnet and once when we opened the envelope all these glinting fairyflies skittered out stinging. And she'll turn the faucet to a dribble and dance alone to the spatter, some old-timey twirling minuet. And she has a thing for blurry photographs to the point that the walls of her room are covered, hazes of tree line, of night sky, of faces. And she's pretty deadpan, like the time she said she never suffers a Sunday because Sundays are too fucking quiet, so she just concentrates at midnight on Saturday and dematerializes for twenty-four hours, and we laughed at that but she didn't even crack a smile. And she asks if we've missed her every time she enters a room, and we say, Of Course!—because there's something kintsugi in the sound of her voice. And she's been with us a while, I guess, since... when was it she moved in? And she gave herself a stick-and-poke above the knee, of a looping symbol that she says appeared to her in a long, dark dream and hasn't been seen by living eyes for like seven centuries. And she puts petals from the wilted flower arrangement on the kitchen counter under her tongue. And she looks away and hums during all the commercials. And she leaves hair everywhere, coiled in a shape that seems so familiar. And she's always eyeing our smoke box, the carved rosewood antique we found at the thrift store for two dollars because it was stuck shut and that now we can't find the lid to, and she acts nervous anytime we reach in to roll a joint even though we've explained it's totally decriminalized, and then she asks how long we think we could live in a prison as small as that very box. And she asks what we would dream of in that time. And she floats above our beds while we sleep, we're pretty sure, drinking down our exhalations and disappearing just before we can get our eyes cracked open, but the echo and warmth of her still clings in the air above us and we're almost disappointed, almost invite her out of hiding, but some instinct keeps us quiet. And she brews kombucha. And she'll sometimes whisper "never again" to the spider plant as she pinches off pieces of terra cotta. And she's all we ever think about, god make it stop, a flood of notions and images and tastes and scents, endless shades of Her, and they all feel eager for our attention, and when we try to think of anything else, even terrible, heartbreaking things, hoping those will pull us from this torrent of Her, nothing ever works and we're swept through our days, lost and so, so tired, and we just want to be left alone, please, just let us go, get the fuck out of... and she presses leaves in the pages of our books. And she's filled our recipes with beetle-chewed scraps of elm. And she's adrift in the dark, curling and clinging to the air we breathe. And she wants to know: have we missed her, have we missed her, have we missed her.

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