Test Results

Six weeks, four thousand dollars, and twelve hundred miles later, I figured I was done with the cleansing process, so I sat down to my fifth root beer of the day and attempted to hammer out, in a cramped twenty minutes and in a room that smelled like day-old, double-chocolate brownies, pointless dribble about what the cleansing process meant to me, even though it meant nothing to me—and good, wasn't that the point—and nothing to the people around me, some of whom had noticed that my wardrobe had whittled down into two pairs of blue jeans, four similarly comfortable t-shirts, and one very used pair of Toms, and all of whom kept watching me, waiting for me to inhale or take a step or cry, as if seeing me breathe would let them breathe easier, not knowing that I'd stopped breathing merely milliseconds before I'd heard the words “six to eight weeks.” It was 10:32 a.m. I'd stopped breathing, gone home, and watered the plants.