One day you wake up and it’s better. Not a faint grasping at a hope that it’s better, it just is. Maybe it’ll be back to the old guard by noon, but this morning you sense an invisible shift in the layout of everything around you, as if everything in the world was taken away and replaced with slightly brighter replicas overnight. You hardly want to accept it, but your heart can’t help it in its bursting, and the feeling manages to hang on through your morning shower, and yes, a look in the mirror afterwards reveals that there’s a shine in your eye.

Will your friends notice? They do. The concerned telephone calls to each other to which you weren’t privy, the stilted, well-meaning but empty words of encouragement, the frustration of seeing you not at your best for so long: As if by wave of a magic wand these are replaced with the recognition that this particular sickness has run its course. And they know, because they’ve been down and gotten back up too.

Life becomes a fun game again. You’re the car, the thimble, the iron moving around the game board that is the whole wide world. In due time, before you know it, you’ll even be the smooth metal ball rolling under the glass, flying up the alley, going almost too fast, bouncing into and off of bumpers that either fling you off or pull you in for a moment, all the time hurdling toward the lowest point until some flipper knocks you up into the air again. There’s a risk of hurt in this human pin-ball, but you’re up for it, because you conveniently just remembered that you’ve missed it so much.

The feeling sticks around, despite all odds and your own worst fears, and after days of feeling this refreshment, you actually begin to look back fondly on the darkness. It was your own special kind of pain, unique to you, and now that it’s gone, you actually find yourself wondering if you’ve become less exceptional without it. Except for the way that it changed you forever, made you a little older, a little stronger, you might be tempted to go back to its comfort, smothering as it was. But no. You’ve become attached to how much easier it is to do everything, how nice it is to not constantly see the worst in yourself, how much better it is to go through life wanting to live it.

And then one day you run into him or her again, by accident, and it feels a lot like someone climbs inside you and slices you from your neck to your intestines with a dagger that’s been sitting in a freezer for a couple hours. But it only lasts for a little while, and after it fades you can at least be happy in the knowledge that your heart will long carry a memory of something that your mind has managed to make all better.