I just got back from the hospice wing and I am vibrating with rage. Just pure, unadulterated heat under my skin. I spent three hours this morning cleaning my mother's bathroom because she missed the toilet again—AGAIN—and then I drove straight to see him. Dr. Vance. The only man who ever gave a damn about what I had to say about dialectics or the structural failures of the state. Now he’s sitting there in a gown that’s three sizes too big, looking like a handful of dry sticks, and I can't even get a full sentence out of him. I’m drowning in domesticity, drowning in it, and my life preserver is literally fading into the mattress. We used to go at it for hours. Hours. Every single Tuesday in his office, we would tear apart the syllabus and build it back up. He called me formidable. He used that word—formidable. Now? Now he can barely remember to breathe. I tried to bring up the paper I’m supposed to be finishing, the one about the epistemological break, and he just looked at me with these milky eyes and patted my hand. He patted my hand like I’m some kind of... of nurse. Like I’m just another body there to fluff his pillows. I am NOT just a body. I have a mind, I have a fucking mind, and it is starving to death. Everyone else in my life treats me like a utility. A faucet. Turn me on, get the help, turn me off. My husband needs his shirts, my mom needs her meds, the kids need their damn lunches. I am a ghost in my own house. I go to that hospital room to feel real, to feel like the person who won the fellowship, the person who actually has something to contribute to the world. But he’s slipping. He’s slipping away and he’s taking the only version of me I actually like with him. He’s taking her to the grave and I’m just going to be left here with the laundry and the silence. The goddamn silence. He tried to say something today. He leaned in, his breath smelling like that weird medicinal metallic rot, and he whispered my name. I thought—I thought maybe we’d have one more spark. One last sharp-edged debate about the aesthetics of ruin or something, anything. But he just asked for water. He just wanted a sip of lukewarm water. I stood there holding the plastic straw to his lips and I wanted to scream. I wanted to shake him and say DON'T LEAVE ME HERE WITH THESE PEOPLE. I am losing the only person who speaks my language. Every day he gets smaller, every day he gets quieter, and I am getting louder inside my own head and nobody can hear it. I’m sitting in my car in the driveway right now and I can’t go inside. I can see the kitchen light on. I know my husband is going to ask what’s for dinner. I know he’s going to ask if the professor is "comfortable." Comfortable. Who cares if he’s comfortable? He’s supposed to be BRILLIANT. He’s supposed to be telling me I’m wrong about my third chapter. Instead, I’m watching the greatest intellect I’ve ever known turn into a pile of laundry.