Room After Room

She can see her breath in the room of her future.

If it were any warmer, the Polaroids that paper the walls would develop.

She moves her thumb over one of the pictures, like doing a rubbing of a grave. The warmth brings out the brown eyes of a child. They're her eyes, but how could she be a child in her own future? She rubs to reveal more—tiny blue hands—and the cold sends the eyes back into the chemicals.

The doctor told her to sleep. Instead she revisits thoughts from her childhood, as if the thoughts had never before occurred to her. The thoughts are so opaque, so veiled by chemicals, that she can't seem to have them for the second time.