Free The Best American Essays 2015 by Ariel Levy Page A

my hand on the lever, pulling back to slow it all down—if not everywhere then at least here, in my place on the couch in the sunroom at the far back of the house, where everything has been set up to accommodate me. Extra pillows, bottles of water, the stage set for recuperation. All of a sudden, I am more still in myself than I can remember being in a very long time, so still that I can now just sit and watch the slow smooth sliding of the shadow through the room, which for extended moments I think of not as a gradual increase of dark but rather as an ebbing away of the light, a sensation like something being gently lifted, gently peeled back
. . .
    . . . extended moments—
because those are what I have now, day after day, the succession of them marking the path back to being fully mobile, fully able, but on the way I have these near silences, the house ticking faintly on its old beams, the soft blurry purr of the refrigerator, little swirls of water through the pipes. How the feel of time changes when all the terms are altered. What on most days had moved with an almost hectic momentum, an ill-choreographed succession of one thing after another, one day just halted, causing the hours to then pool up behind it: the afternoon immobilized, with almost nothing to mark the change or confirm that this is not the world paralyzed into still life.
    One day, another day, each day there when I open my eyes like something uncrated and laid out on all sides—to be assembled, no directions given, except of course that one thing will always follow another. You set the spoon down onto the lap tray and then ask yourself,
What next?
And if you are reflective, since you have the time, you think,
How right that there is always a next thing.
But you could also just sit and stare. It pulls at you, almost a challenge, a temptation:
What if?
What if I did nothing now but look here in front of me at the vase of these flowers, tulips, delivered at the door days ago (an event!), with a card from a former student—consider them, how they’ve started to droop on their stems, the petals losing that first waxy shine, the way they seem to measure the time in the room, and so it’s not so odd that I would think of the line from Keats, the urn, the “foster child of silence and slow time,” the reminder, there—and here—that in back of the obvious pulse that marks the outer day are these other measures, like the measure of the afternoon light on these tulips, and past them—out the big window—that faint but incessant twitching of the new leaves in the aspen.
    Â 
    Convalescence—means exactly what? I look it up.
Con
- +
valescere:
“altogether grow strong.” Gain health—simple enough. I am gaining back my health after a surgery, the right hip replaced, because finally there could be no more waiting. Everything hurt, I heard myself crackling like wicker with every movement I made. I was going up the stairs on all fours, like a dog. It was time. The operation was decided, scheduled. It would require deep anesthesia, the implanting of a titanium part, and then a designated period of recovery, a month or more of seriously curbed activity, daily painkillers, exercises to reinstate movements . . .
    Three dots here, ellipsis, and in fact they are the punctuation proper to this whole surgery, and often enough apt to the convalescence as well—representing the sensation, at times drug-related, of a moment prolonging itself, taking on no defining inflection, connecting to the next moment only because the next moment is there to be connected
to.
    Everything was explained to me. I was told, step by step, what would happen. But the experience—from the morning of my going in for the surgery on—has been nothing like what I had come to imagine. I did not have the terms, the real terms. I could picture all of the separate components of what would happen, but I had no way of