As a child, Sami was sweet, gentle and forgiving, like a person who has no idea what the hell is going on. She said prayers for people who didn't deserve them, like the bus driver who laughed when she tripped in the aisle and the older cousin who told her that she was definitely an accident. She prayed for a kid named Vance who tricked her into taking a drink of his spoiled milk and then called her "curd lips" for the rest of second grade.

Little Sami wanted goodness for everyone, and ease, and the soaring feeling she got when she put her nose against a box fan. God, help them wake up on time when they have an early morning obligation. God, bless them with enough money to afford the softer varieties of tp. God, let them feel worthy of love even though they have acne and hairy pits.

As an adult, Sami collects enemies and never says shit to God. Yesterday she called her cat a scumbag.

The day before her divorce was finalized, she told a cashier she coached the local volleyball team who recently won state. He could easily fact-check her lie, but he couldn't do it while he was tucking her blueberries next to her burritos, so Sami stood there with her jaw set like a successful leader, a competent strategist, a woman who wasn't embarrassed to shout phrases containing the word "ladies."

But Big Sami missed being a little idiot. She hadn't planned on seeing the worst in people who were trying their best. She hadn't planned on being a bitter ex, a hostile daughter, a person who sighed with every exhale. She missed good intentions and the days when her teeth didn't grind while she slept. She missed having a stomach that wasn't too full of resentment to properly digest her food.

On a whim she searched the phrase "how to regress to your childhood self," but all the hits were about regression being a defense mechanism and trauma response and not, like, a cool way to get back to your purest state of being. She eventually found a woman with zero medical qualifications who claimed that prolonged exposure to UVA light zapped her back to her prepubescent self, the self who shimmied with happiness in the shower and confidently wore sunglasses while touring underground caves.

Sami was intrigued but not naive. She did her own research while eating corn chips. The legit sources agreed that UVA rays might help with rickets and certain skin conditions, but they were totally mum about the way ultraviolet rays affect a person's linear progression through the years of their lives. Sami thought hmm, inconclusive and immediately messaged her sister Jen, asking if Tammy still had a salon.

Back when they were preteens, Tammy had let Sami and Jen tan for free because she'd gone to high school with their mom. The sisters would go around the corner and buy cream sodas afterward, because drinking something thick and sweet when they were flushed and sweaty made them feel less like virgins.

But Tammy had become a hot-shot real estate agent, so Sami had to go across the train tracks to get her UVA hit. She'd decided tanning was worth a shot—her skin was already aging prematurely, and it cost less than counseling or grabbing dinner with a barely-listening friend. Also, it was February, when the sun takes a sabbatical.

She paid a person half her age $12 to tan for fifteen minutes. Removing her clothing in her private room made her feel crushingly pathetic, like the kind of person people said bless her heart about. As she freed her belly from her pants, she reminded herself that she didn't really believe that tanning would refurbish her spirit. What she believed in was intention. Also maybe in extended naked sweating.

The bright machine turned Sami into a shooting laser right away. The proximity and intensity of the bulbs made her feel like a shaft-of-light kind of person, no longer reactive or volatile or prone to name calling. She felt seven-and-a-half, tops.

But how many minutes had it been? Two? Eight? Ten? She liked being a laser beam, but her knee pits were sweating buckets. Taking deep breaths, she imagined that her sweat contained decades of hardened disappointment—broken hearts, honorable mentions, false starts, and unflattering outfits all slowly leaking from the backs of her knees.

When Sami heard a scuffling sound, her first thought was that her dermatologist had come to give her a stern look. She opened her blazing coffin wide enough to see tiny fingers poking under the room's door. She shouted, "Hey!" and the person with the tiny fingers laughed. Then Sami saw hair on the floor—the poker was peeking.

Where were this child's parents? She shouted "Quit it," but the head didn't move so she added, "you little shit" and the hair disappeared.

Sami tried to get back into beam-mode—she was pretty sure she had at least ten more years of dismay to exude. But when she closed her eyes she no longer saw that simple healing light. What she saw was the floor of the very room she was in, as if through a tight crack—the glow of the machine bouncing off the white linoleum, the dust under the chair that held her clothes, her phone inside her shoe.

The hair, had it been her exact shade? The fingers, were they the ones that used to come at the end of her arms? Her cheek, did it feel cold from touching the floor?

Sami touched her own cheek and whispered I'm sorry (for the willful forgetting, for pushing away the best people, for yelling just now) but before she finished speaking she was already nodding and shrugging because she had been forgiven right away, no problem.


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