With the cold nodes stuck to my skin, I lie holding the thin sheet to my bare chest and hoping my heart is not defective, though I know I’ve seen it break a thousand times. No one speaks but the machine. Like the earth, I’m measured in mountains. I am weighed in water, my body a shore where mysterious waves break and vanish. Needles. Nausea and electricity. I grow sea legs. My brother once told me If you’re that sick, die. I imagined the railroad crossing by his house, how it’d be to not brake at those flashing red lights. I don’t know how I can want to live and die at the same time, the prescription bottles on my counter like little prayers, like firebreaks during a dry year. I don’t remember the first time I told someone I loved them, or who it was. I remember watching the bloom of summer daybreak from the back of a fiery red dun mare that died a long time ago. She ran at the neighbor’s fence one windy day and broke her neck. I thought if I could get her to stand again, she would live, though her body was too heavy for me to lift. A broken horse can’t be unbroken. But it can forget. “Let’s go over these results,” the doctor says. I graph like an earthquake. The sound in the shaking. The disarrangement when a line breaks.