“We’re likely to have to determine out a way for me to aid you,” my partner says once I am home on the couch, with my cast propped on a stack of pillows.

It is not the quick wrist cast I experienced envisioned. Fairly, it begins at the shoulder, hinges at the elbow, tightens at the wrist and weighs many kilos. Beneath it, ache beats in time with my heart. But I won’t just take the drugs. The ones my mom took to die, the types that took her absent from me, manufactured her necessarily mean, altered her mind. The kinds my husband’s mom swallowed each and every day, an addiction she could not shake, to all the identical success. Meanness, disconnection, dying. I’d rather sense the hurting, the craving for it to prevent.

Days pass, the suffering subsides and the cast takes on a persona. A cumbersome agent of modify. My husband brings me food stuff, and where by at very first I dislike that I just cannot put together it myself, count each and every calorie that will make its way on to the plate, there’s nothing I can do but accept my stress and take in.

He purchases stencils and stickers, and we bedazzle my plaster arm till it glitters gold. He wraps me in a rubber sleeve in advance of each individual shower. He stands guiding me in the mirror and I speak him by the basic anatomy of a ponytail, how to get my hair, how to fasten it with a plastic band. He provides me reams of yellow authorized pads. Within just a 7 days, I’m at my desk, cast in a sling, grateful that the fall took my still left wrist instead than my right. Smaller mercies.

Writing longhand is sluggish get the job done. But the time it takes to make a sentence produces a specific lyricism, and the plot I once resisted gets to be the plot I embrace. I’m continue to crafting, continue to wearing the cast, when the globe goes into a lockdown.

Helplessness, uncertainty, anxiety. A period of loss and permitting go. The calorie-counting subsides, then surges, then subsides. The virus does the similar. When last but not least the solid arrives off, my arm has the visual appeal of a newborn, gentle and not nonetheless of this environment. Fingers no cost, I transcribe the novel I wrote by hand into my pc. I revise, revise once again, choose terms, punctuation, images with care. Right here, a issue mark. In this article, a coronary heart. Right here, a new earth for my character to stroll through.

Episode is a column chronicling a minute in a writer’s existence. Allie Rowbottom is the author of the novel “Aesthetica” and the relatives memoir “Jell-O Women.”