"Everybody knows deep down that life is as much about the things that do not happen as the things that do and that's not something that ought to be glossed over or denied because without frustration there would hardly be any need to daydream. And daydreams return me to my original sense of things and I luxuriate in these fervid primary visions until I am entirely my unalloyed self again. So even though it sometimes feels as if one could just about die from disappointment I must concede that in fact in a rather perverse way it is precisely those things I did not get that are keeping me alive."--Claire-Louise Bennett, Pond

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The bruises where the nurses had stuck or attempted to stick (yikes!) IVs into my hands and arms are fading away. I still feel marked by my time in hospital, despite how short it was. It hadn't felt so, all those hours waiting for IVs and meds and meals and doctor visits. It felt interminable, like how all I'd ever know was that hospital trolley, the rustling of nurses in the background, the blaring of game shows from rooms.

For some time afterwards, because I was coming down from the steroids, I was quite blue, detached from everyone. I didn't know if I could feel anything but melancholy, the feeling of having been stripped of vitality, pared unwillingly down to some carcass barely inhabited by consciousness.

Among strangers in the sunshine of a Portuguese sea village, it all feels quare, something that happened to someone else a long time ago. Something about this place--how everyone walks languidly, as if daydreaming, how large dogs lope on their own down narrow streets, how all roads lead to the sea--demands a renewal of the curious, desiring self.

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