The gray-haired woman calls it the pit. I’m back in the pit, she says. This is a meeting for the depressed. An entire program for the depressed. You attend three times a week. You get a weekly code, you sign in, and you rate your mood for the day. One to ten. Have you taken your medication? Have you eaten breakfast? Yes. Yes. You are a good little patient. You want to get better. You want to climb out of the pit. When the older woman says the pit, you imagine the Sarlacc pit—its toothed mouth and soft belly and the red hot sand. Except the pit you’re in is cold and dark; there is no exit. Like a waterless well you’ve fallen into gradually and then all at once. It started in Las Cruces when you stopped your medication; you free-fell into Tucson and here you are at the bottom in Sebastopol, thirty-two and living at home with your parents. Thirty-two and the walls are smooth, and there is no rope, no ladder. Sometimes there’s a circle of light above, and sometimes you think you can feel its warmth, see the shadow of your limbs. Some days that’s all you need: a sunbeam, a shadow. Other days, you wake already digested. Other days, it doesn’t matter much because I’m back in the pit means you can get out but always slip back in. Meaning the pit isn’t outside but inside. With you now and always. Teeth or no teeth. Smooth walls or a ladder. The pit is the pit. You’re in the pit, grasping at sunbeams, praying for shadows.

So, I’m in bed with my good friend, but not like that. It had been like that—we have a history. He has a girlfriend now, so we’re just friends. Except he’s in my bed. And it’s dark and late and drunk. His skin has this particular odor. Familiar. Maybe it’s from climbing or his dog. Maybe he needs to shower. I’m thinking about this, and how I’ll probably wash my sheets tomorrow. Then I feel him close to me, and I suddenly want him. I want him more than I ever did when we were lovers. 

His hands knead into my skin, hips, stomach, breasts. I turn to kiss him. 

Then he says, “We can’t. I mean, I can’t do this.”

I sigh, loud, annoyed. He tries to curl around me again, stroking my hair. I push away, stand up. Verticality snaps me into a rage. I want him gone. Or now, I want to fuck him out of spite.  

“What are you doing?” he asks.

I walk to the kitchen, turn on the stove and heat a small round coal. I see myself in the window standing there in sweats and a t-shirt, horny at two am, lighting up a hookah. I almost laugh, except then I remember he’s in the next room. I hold onto the counter for balance, lost in the sort of nausea I get sometimes stepping out of the shower in the morning—the rung-out feeling that maybe it’s pointless after all, that maybe it’s better to crawl back in bed, or crumple right there on the bathroom floor, arms clenched to abdomen, broken in two, right above the hip.                                

  Then he’s in the doorway.  “What are you doing?”

I say, “Taking a bath. I need to take a bath. I can’t sleep.”

I don’t realize this is my plan until I say it. 

I unwrap the sticky neon sheesha and leave it like an offering on the counter. I fill the glass base with water, open the freezer and add a few ice cubes. The difficult part is putting all the pieces together, the metal body sunk into the base, the little ceramic cup fit on top with a ring of aluminum foil to seal it. Then the sheesha, broken up and spread into the cup. The smell of the coal is thick and satisfying like engine exhaust. It sparkles and cracks. I thumb tack tiny holes into the aluminum, flip the coal on top with a spatula.  

He looks at me with his thoughtful chin-down gaze, arms propped against the short kitchen doorframe. 

“You think you can just touch me?” I’m yelling now. “Is that it?  You think that if you don’t kiss me it won’t count. There’s some sort of gray area there? Like my body isn’t my body unless you touch my face?”

He’s shaking his head. I fling the spatula through the air for emphasis.

“What do you want me to do?” he asks. 

And there’s something in his tone: the power has shifted. I could say anything and he’d do it. 

I don’t want him to take a bath with me, so I don’t know why I tell him to. 

I want him gone. I want to be alone sucking on smoke in a dark bathroom in my little cabin. But he climbs in and begins to touch me again. I have maybe already disappeared into the water.

We don’t have sex. I don’t remember what we do. But in the morning, we are no longer friends either. Something between us has shattered. It may have been the power shifting. Him: standing in front of me with my hookah. 

Him vulnerable to my demands. 

He leaves and eventually tells his girlfriend some story of us. She doesn’t break up with him, but he’s not allowed to see me anymore. It doesn’t feel like a loss. It doesn’t feel like anything.  

In another life, the woman he’s engaged to could have been me. My other self. If that other self was less tumultuous. Less anxious. In another life, I’m content with my body. Its curves and imperfections. In another life, I didn’t starve myself before meeting him, eating only kale chips and nonfat yogurt, vomiting everything else up. I was instead nourishing and caring for my body with tenderness. I did not binge-fuck men in Prescott only to forget their faces, their names. I did not drink too much too often or chain-smoke cigarettes. In another life, I am the woman he wants to marry, not the one he wants to cheat on in Indiana in the middle of a polar vortex. 

In this other life, we do a tour of California on his motorcycle. It doesn’t matter that it’s not that kind of motorcycle. In this other life, he has the right kind of motorcycle, and that’s what we do. My hair streams from my helmet as we soar down the 101. Salt air whips our faces. There’s no one but us on the road, which would never happen because California has way too many people, too many cars, but in this other life, it does happen. We’re alone, and I’m smiling so hard my face hurts. We pull off to the side of the road—the 1 now—outside of Santa Cruz. An empty beach. Sun-warmed sand, the curl and crash of white water in the distance. He strips off his clothes—we both do—and we race into the waves. That’s when he does it. That’s when he asks. No ring, just the sting of saltwater and our bare bodies in the bright sunlight. 

In this life, he took me to Vegas. For my birthday. We hiked the desert in Anza Borrego and then drove to the strip, stayed in The Hotel in Mandalay Bay. That great gold glittering skyscraper. Suites only. And a bathtub I didn’t want to leave. In the room with our bed, I stared across the desert city through our full wall of windows. I stood naked with the whole of Las Vegas before me. Until he called me to bed. Or maybe I’m remembering wrong. Maybe I stood there until I crawled into bed. Me at the window while he watched from a distance. In another life, I am alone in the hotel room. In Vegas by myself, for myself. There is no fiancé. In another life, I never meet him at all.