February 2026
TMTBTMIP
#22: His laugh
I would like to give the Chateau a five-star rating, because I believe it really did help, but I’m afraid that’s impossible. The food alone prevents it. Everything they served up was pureed within an inch of its life—closer to foam than form. Pureed peas, parsnips, cauliflower. Even the meats were stewed into softness, before they were pounded and pulverized. All the sinew blended away into gray sludges. The nurses brought streams of liquids: hot bullion, weak tea laced with spoonfuls of brandy. I yearned for treats, but the only sweetness we were allowed was custard, unless it was someone’s birthday. Then we were each afforded one piece of very dry, very plain vanilla cake. There was a day I thought it might have been my forty-seventh birthday, but nobody brought any cake and anyway, I wasn’t sure.
As advertised, you would have expected to see a Michelin star on the door when you walked in. The brochures promised liver with Pernod sauce, tame ducks with fennel slaw and small, innocent turnips, lamb steak and chasseur sauce, and young vegetables, harvested from the garden by residents in the morning dew. I hate to disavow you of any of this, because I remember the hopeful feeling it gave me as I approached my convalescence, but it’s only fair to tell the truth. Mostly they fed me eggs: soft boiled, raw and stirred into a cup of weak meat stock or milk or wine or tomato juice, something called “Adam and Eve On a Raft,” that was simply two poached eggs on a piece of toast. Eggs scrambled, coddled, shirred, pickled, but never, ever fried.
The first time I saw him, I was eating a jellied clam compote. As always, I had my accordion file neatly tucked under the folding chair. Before Leonard and the girls had dropped me off there, I spent days assembling my documents, though no one at the Chateau ever bothered to look at them. My folders contained years of abnormal but inconclusive results, itemized symptoms and insults, detailed descriptions of chiropractic maneuvers, lists of ingested supplements, medications, and herbal concoctions, and a not-so-concise history of every possible exposure or circumstance that might have contributed to my root cause: toxic mold; birth control pills; antibiotics; adverse childhood experiences; the MTHR gene; overwork; pregnancies; the Epstein-Barr virus; brain chemistry; a desire to please; suppressed ambitions; undeterred ambitions; and so on. I had also packed my manuscript, Far Out to Sea and Alone: The Dissociative State in British Modernism, thinking at last to close the loop on my unfinished dissertation, but one of the first things the nursing staff had me do was set it on fire. Thus, my archive thinned.
Day after day, I sat and ate, still itemizing the scorching fatigue, brain fog, joint pain, migraines, crackling nerves, histamine attacks, skin breakouts, and other sundry, miscellaneous ailments that had landed me there. For the first time in a very long time, nothing was expected of me. The local dispensary made a house call to the Chateau on Tuesdays and a physician came every other Wednesday. Both tended to shake me out of the blur for a spell, but most of the time I didn’t know what day it was, or how to live inside a week.
On one of the Doctor Burzynski Wednesdays, Nurse Saanvi told me, “A man will arrive this Friday.” I counted the days, but nothing changed. They must have been keeping him somewhere safe. We were only the same dozen or so women, spread out in the gardens in our folding chairs with the lightweight wool blankets laid across our laps and the sun beating down; Old Martha asleep and snoring like a freight train, just as always. I was disgusted by my interest in this apparition of a man, but my self-reprieve had no dampening effect. Of course, they had explained this phenomenon to us at orientation. You cannot think your way out of a feeling.
Men and I didn’t mix, but I continued to give them my full attention. There were two possible explanations for this. One was that I was a disaster of a woman. The other was that all men were disasters. Nurse Saanvi suggested that both these things could be true, which would go a long way toward explaining the severity of my failures with Leonard.
Days later, when the man appeared, he had an untidy beard, wiry graying hair, and muscular arms. He wore the same pale green tunic we all did. He strode all about the great lawn, examining the parameter, peering into the endless thicket of laurel for what may have been hours. I watched him with my spoon suspended, my gelatinous clams liquifying. He broke into a cantor, first circling us all and running his hand along the boxed, green hedges and then zig zagging among us. He stopped short in front of me, glared into my eyes, then galloped toward Old Martha, who awoke with a jolt and cooed, “Here, pretty baby,” which made him laugh, showing the lines around his eyes. These instantly became a weakness of mine. Within a few hours of his arrival, I could already tell you sixty-seven things I loved about him and could not live without.
After lunch they had us sit in a big circle on the lawn. This was rare, as most of the healing was solitary. Nurse Saanvi asked us to write a list of things we might need to give ourselves permission to do. We went around the circle and shared. When it got to the man, whose name was Sheen, he locked eyes with Saanvi and sat in silence for a good thirty seconds before saying, emphatically, “PASS.” Then we were told to go forth and take at least one small action to excavate our reserves, to unbury our courage. I changed into a softer tunic and checked the second volume of Virginia Woolf’s diary out of the library. We did not see him at dinner that evening, where dessert was a celebratory steamed raisin and prune pudding with treacle sauce. After I finished, I licked the last of the slicked brown smudges from my plate, with its circumference of trailing blue flowers.
#40: His hair is adaptable and that has served him well, helped him to play many parts.
It must have been a Sunday, because the girls had come for their weekly visit and we were sitting together in the gazebo. If she spoke at all, my teenager Lorraine called it my “Eat, Piss, Lounge journey,” and rolled her kohl-splattered eyes. There was a surprising warmth to it. Her younger sister Hester only ever spoke of Fernando, the new puppy who had replaced me in the household. I hated Fernando with my whole being, even as I struggled with the very concept of being.
Their visits were the days I most looked forward to, but when they returned home to Leonard and his accomplished and functional new girlfriend Valerie, I was often overtaken with uncontrollable weeping and thrashing, my bedsheets wet and tangled around me by morning. This at least was feeling. It was worse when I could not cry and instead sat stick still, watching the plump robins pick at worms, watching the peacocks fanning their way across the lawn, my dread baking in the last of the afternoon heat until one of the nurses came to tell me it was time to go inside for dinner.
On this particular day, the girls had smuggled in some ruffled potato chips and a pint of raspberries. “It’s a secret,” Hester stage whispered, as Lorraine thrust the spoils my way in a crumpled paper bag and gestured for me to tuck it into my large half-moon pocket. I made a big show of stashing the berries away for later and opening the chips for us all to enjoy. I didn’t want them to think I was some sort of weakling who was cowed by the employees at the Chateau. Honestly, if you are thinking of admitting yourself, you should know that the staff’s ministrations were at best uneven. One minute they were all over you with rules they swore up and down were for your own good, the next they couldn’t lift a finger to enforce anything, as far as I could see, excepting the centrality of eggs on the menu.
Sheen, per usual, was skulking around the boundaries of the property, fading in and out of view. I pretended not to notice, but the girls were astute.
“Who is that man?” Lorraine asked.
“What man?” I feigned ignorance.
“That man over there,” she said, gesturing toward him as he disappeared behind a blockish, unkempt topiary. “He looks familiar.”
“They let men in here?” Hester asked, with growing excitement.
“He’s no one,” I told them, hoping he could hear us and would be impressed by my nonchalance.
When I dressed for bed that night and shook out my chemise, berries tumbled to the floor and splattered in little bursts as I bent to retrieve them. Their juices stained the soles of my feet, and I pictured myself running toward those girls, leaving fuchsia footprints behind.
#61: His patriotism
I started venturing into the kitchen, which was mostly just a compilation of surfaces rendered in stainless steel. I took to dressing for these occasions. I couldn’t say why exactly, except that each of my tunics had begun to reek of something not me—nag champa incense and mildew. One smelled like wet dog and made me think of Fernando, so I especially disliked it. I hadn’t packed much, but it made me feel like a complete person to don a pair of jeans and a bulky sweater. I put on my old pair of royal blue flats, partly to complete the look and mostly because they made less noise than the Chateau-issued bamboo sandals we were expected to wear at all times, which scuffed and scraped along the hallways.
The kitchen was almost always empty, but sometimes I saw people there I never encountered anywhere else. Once, a scrawny figure with protruding elbows who wore a starched, robin’s egg blue dress with a matching checkered apron. Her chestnut hair was pulled back into a taut bun, as she stirred the contents of a large silver stockpot, her face dewed and reddened by steam. Another time, five teenaged girls were washing dishes in an assembly line, listening to Joni Mitchell, wet handprints soaking the fronts of their shirts, soap bubbles drifting between them, traveling, traveling, traveling.
No one ever seemed to care that I was there. We would exchange nods and I would back away through the door, as if I’d only made a wrong turn. On the occasions when I had the place to myself, I inventoried the industrial refrigerator but avoided the vaster walk-in like it was an inescapable cavern, filled with hypothermia and spores.
The suction on the refrigerator door was powerful and to open it I had to pull so hard on the handle that it felt like calisthenics. Inside were many treasures—salami; an entire bin of small, sunny clementines; a pitcher of milk with cream forming on top; a super-sized bag of organic cheese sticks. I had never taken anything, but the cheese sticks tested me. I assumed I could pocket one and it would never be missed, but dairy was a problem substance for me. Invariably it caused a worsening of my symptoms and the introduction of a few new ones, from a heavy, stagnant buzz throughout the whole of my lymphatic system, to the beginning of a sinus infection, to an uptick in depression and lethargy. So, I played it safe. I had borrowed money to come to the Chateau and although I was less and less sure of what might constitute success, the thought of failing on account of cheese was unbearable.
And still it was everywhere, tempting me. I was examining a Ziploc bag and holding it up to the light. Inside was a dense, smeared lump with blue veins running through it. A muffled clatter made me jump nearly to the ceiling and the bagged ooze landed on the floor with a thud. The door to the walk-in opened from the inside in slow motion and I froze to my spot. Out came Sheen with a raw chicken carcass and a glint in his eye.
“I won’t tell if you won’t,” he said through gritted teeth. “I couldn’t stand another egg.”
“I usually just look,” I told him.
“I’ll drink to that,” he said, his eyes slanting sideways at a three-quarters full bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon sitting on the gleaming counter nearest him.
“Put the chicken in the sink,” I told him, and he did.
He found a pair of rainbow mugs and poured generously. We clinked.
I got to work on the chicken, slathering cultured butter between skin and flesh, stuffing it with herbs and lemon, sprinkling it with salt and freshly cracked pepper. Leonard’s mother taught me what she knew before she died. Sometimes simplest is best. While I surrounded the bird with tiny, earthy potatoes, Sheen was slicing a loaf of bread and making a bubbling concoction on the stovetop. Everything went into it—more butter, grated cheese, a dark beer, and some bottle of brown sauce from the far depths of the refrigerator that made him shrug and say, “This will have to do.”
He toasted slices of the bread and spooned the silky mixture over them, setting one in front of me with a flourish.
“I really shouldn’t eat dairy products,” I told him, hesitating.
“Oh nonsense,” he said. The soft lilt of his voice was cajoling. “Have a double toke of Maui Gorilla Glue tomorrow, a charcoal capsule, and a gallon of water. You’ll be none the worse for wear.”
While we waited for the chicken, we found a second bottle of wine and a box of industrial chocolate cupcakes, each one wrapped in plastic and boasting a stiff cream center.
“I loved you in Frost/Nixon,” I blurted out.
“Oh,” he said with genuine pleading in his eyes. “Don’t mention it.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Depends on the something.”
“Do you work here?”
Long pause. “I’m certainly working on something while I’m here.”
I fumbled with my mass-produced confectionary. The pastry came apart in my hands and stuck to my fingers.
“What about you,” he asked. “What’s your endeavor?”
“Getting back to my daughters,” I said, with unexpected certainty.
“Well, what’s stopping you?”
I thought of the Chateau, its great lawn, the peacocks, the slurried meats, how high I got sometimes, and said nothing.
“Well anyway,” he went on. “I’m not working now.”
I took him in: the graying twist of his hair, architectural in nature; the beard to match; the air of being an elder statesman, without being old exactly, just in the middle; the rewilding eyebrows; the deeper lines on the left side of his forehead; the partly opened denim shirt, three buttons freed. He had been an absolute beauty in his youth, nearly gamine and clean as a whistle, but now he was seasoned and delicious.
I wanted to kiss him. I wanted him to kiss me. And I especially wanted him to want to kiss me, for reasons that were likely attributable to some alliance of cultural conditioning and pheromonic convergence. I hadn’t had sex in a very long time, because of how slowly things had fallen apart with Leonard—it had taken a lifetime to blow ours up—and it occurred to me that I missed it. Instead, we devoured that chicken in silence, our fingers glistening, the outer shells of the potatoes crisped and crackling.
#67: Everything happens across his face.
“The past is the past,” Saanvi said to me one day. “Clean slate; Don’t wait.”
We did nothing but.
Sheen’s arrival must have awakened the very essence of curiosity within me, because before I knew what came over me, I asked after that stinking canine.
“Does he like the park? That little pocket park?” The one right by fucking Valerie’s apartment, I thought. “You know—with the fenced off area for dogs?”
Hester started to answer, her face all lit up as if by Nordic candlelight, but she looked out of the corner of her eye to Lorraine, who gave a slight nod, before she began.
“Oh, yes,” she told me. “That’s where we met Alfred.”
“Who’s Alfred?”
“He’s an old Dalmatian that reeks,” offered Lorraine.
“He’s Fernando’s friend,” said Hester. “Maybe his best friend, after me.”
Lorraine looked exasperated and then she turned to me and said in a cautious tone, “Your hair is different.”
“It’s probably just longer. I’ve been here for a while, right?” I had no solid notion of the length of my stay and hoped she clocked the question as rhetorical.
“It’s shinier,” she said, scowling.
“He’s an Aquarius,” I heard Nurse Saanvi hiss to Olga one day.
“Of course he is,” Olga said. She made a tsk sound with her tongue and her teeth.
The thing they told us in the Lunar Cycles afternoon activity module is that you wait for the first few days after the full moon and listen for what has run its course, what is ready to up and leave you, what is trying to escape. At the quarter moon, you make it official. You grease yourself with the oil you infused with violets and ground ivy during your Anointment 101 module and you open the circle, call on your guides, light a candle black as the night sky and let it burn. You can feel all the world’s eternal, ancestral mothers standing with you, behind you, growing stronger as you heal. Together you must banish whatever it is. You must tell it what you will become in its absence, and you wait until the moon is a nothing left in the sky, until at last you watch your exile slink away like a great, dark panther.
That sounded like a lot of work to me, and I didn’t know what I wanted to become. I didn’t even know what I was. Still, when I agreed to Lorraine’s suggestion of an unauthorized departure from the Chateau, we planned my escape around The Dark Moon.
Week by week, visit by visit, Sheen and the girls had become the best of friends, so we brought him in on it from the word go. He and I held up our end of things, packing provisions through many a midnight kitchen run. He asked me to take a turn about the grounds with him one morning and he showed me where there were gaps in the hedges. A low, chain link fence ran along the other side of the shrubbery.
We stole a pair of shears from the gardener’s shed and a length of rope from Dr. Burzynski’s office. We learned to imitate the calls of crows and owls and practiced our secret bird language with the girls on their visits. Hester dissolved into laughter as Sheen mimicked a peacock’s strut around the gazebo. At night, I rehearsed moving soundlessly down the halls and out the door. Sheen would wait around the corner, letting me know if he could hear so much as a soft plod.
“Oh, that was very good,” he told me once, when I managed to sneak up on him. “I’m going to miss you.”
I quoted Virginia Woolf at him, “Humans do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of bird’s feet is unknown.”
By then we finished each others’ sentences and knew each others’ favorite passages and so he answered, “Here we go alone, and like it better so.”
When the moon finally drained out of the deep, muddled purple of the sky, few of our preparations proved necessary. My bare feet grew wet as I crossed the lawn in darkness. My spine stiffened under a backpack weighed down with all the cured meats, pickles, cheese, and grain mustard the kitchen had to offer. I was a walking charcuterie board. I located what Sheen referred to as The First Flap, a narrow alley between two hedges. I turned left and ran my hand along the cold metal of the fence and came to a gate. I lifted the latch and the gate swung open with a soft creak. I closed it back up and stood waiting for ages. My heart was pounding, partly in fear of Nurse Saanvi’s disapproval, but mostly in anticipation of Hester and Lorraine, these surprisingly whole people who I loved to the point of exhaustion and waking.
Pitch black, blackest black, velvet blackness. I picked the stars one by one out of the sky and named them with acronyms, after my fears: RES (Rodents, Especially Squirrels); SE (Snake Eye); SKS (Sharp Knife Slippage); CP (Custody Proceedings); ITM (Is This Madness?); HWNR (Heights with No Railings); PE (Pink Eye); RDITW (Rats Dying in the Walls); MARC (Mold as Root Cause); CARC (Candida as Root Cause); HMD (Hereditary Macular Degeneration). I thought about how many stars I would give this place once I left. It seemed unjustly injurious to limit it to three, but did the Chateau deserve much more than that?
Eventually, a “caw, CAW!” in the distance. Footsteps. Panting. A whispered mom. Lorraine and Hester and I linked hands through the gate. I would re-open it; I was sure of it now.
Hester’s hands were clammy and I never wanted to let them go. Lorraine’s were cool and solid. I trusted them with everything I had, which was not much, but more than I thought. Fernando started to bark at me, so I crouched down and offered my palm through the bars and he licked every digit, every line, every knuckle, and the soft padded spaces between my fingers. When he coated my right hand, I replaced it with the left. I was in love.
1.A note on appearances: In her extraordinary essay, “On Being Ill,” Virginia Woolf writes of “…this monster, the body, this miracle, its pain…” (TMTBTMIP). She observes, “Incomprehensibility has an enormous power over us in illness, more legitimately perhaps than the upright will allow.” Virginia Woolf, “On Being Ill,” in The Moment and Other Essays (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), pp.10 and 19. Thanks is also due to the superbly talented Welsh actor Michael Sheen, for showing up, and to May Tremel, the author of Everyday Meals for Invalids, who reminds us that “All that is needed is a little love and common sense, and the rest will follow.” May Tremel, Everyday Meals for Invalids: A Collection of Tiny Recipes, Tasty and Nourishing, for Every Day of the Year (New York: Greenberg, Publisher, Inc., [1934]), p. 13.
2.Woolf, “On Being Ill,” p. 14.
Selene Colburn is a writer, bookmaker, and choreographer living in Vermont and Montreal. Her writing has appeared in publications (Hip Mama, Seven Days, Kinnebago); in interdisciplinary performance works at venues across the country; and in the professional literature of library science and cultural heritage. You can find more at linktr.ee/selene_colburn.