it’s mid-april 2022. i’m restless, fidgeting on a plastic waiting room chair, as i enter my sixth hour in a&e. i’m wishing i hadn’t worn jeans, i feel the denim debossing my empty stomach. i twiddle the hospital band around my wrist, the sticky label catching my skin– it’s much too big for me. it was still light outside when i got here; when i was ferried in on an emergency referral to fill sample jars like a spice rack, to be serenaded by smooth radio and scratchy ballpoint as a nurse scribbles down my vague answers to invasive questions, to spend a quarter of a day hanging fire as it was determined whether i’d white knuckled my way down so far that i wouldn’t be allowed to go home this time.

a week passed, according to the clock, and i wrote a poem called 'road to nowhere/path to somewhere’. it wasn’t a starting block on a straight, golden path to perpetual sunshine, but a gentle oath to myself– to see little wonders where i could, to make sure the peachy cumulus of rose-tinted glasses was permanently blown away, and to maintain a several-mile distance between me and another hospital stint.

the space between that time and now is about a year. i find myself looming over that plastic waiting room chair, this time twiddling a one-year recovery token between my fingers instead of a medical band. anniversaries are a time of reunion and reflection– not in a 'ten things i learned in healing’ easy-skim article you’d read on your lunch break sort of way, but finding yourself face-to-face with you, a year younger, is an ineluctable ring-road. i’m still familiar to myself, i wasn’t reborn from the ashes into a shiny new thing as last year me was shelved as a memento.

recovery doesn’t have a shape. it’s not a line, or a peak-and-flow graph, or the re-introductory ring-road. it’s not a neat little snippet, or a pair of sturdy boots, or the first morning you manage to open your blinds and the sun, with fortuitous punctuality, comes back to life at the same time as you. recovery isn’t spun from auspicious, gleaming yarn.

for me, recovery is a fallacy. something i’ve harrowed from the unhallowed ground i’ve walked this last year is knowing that i’m not going to just *get better*, or reach a shining final mile-marker where the work ends. it’s the nature of the beast– it isn’t a fabled battle so much as a commitment to ongoing mediation. it’s something you live alongside. some days it metastasises, taking over the majority share; others, it’s like a silent partner.

some days, i burn reddish-ochre, a paroxysm of neurotic energy and and everything radiates through my bones. others, i’m more summertime lemon– joyful, beaming, my whole day going smooth as silk. sometimes, i face to a colder, cerulean shade; cocooned in a different world, wading in a shoulder-high creek with rocks of leaden sombre in my pockets but kept afloat by disquiet tides that make me jerk with panic when they hit.

most days, though, i radiate a gentler, blush tone. a hue of contentment, a hazy aura rather than a rhodium shield or bare exposure to the elements. healthy, settled, getting by. food in my stomach, music in my headphones, a job i want to show up to. beautiful faces, beautiful places. i take my pills, i protect my circle, i take lots of walks. sure, sleep still eludes me often, i still habitually pick at the skin on my fingers and rhythmically scratch my collarbone in a fluster, and sometimes i’d gladly spend a day or two not speaking to another soul. but those times are punctuated by the sight of a little green exit sign on the horizon– the knowledge that the rosy blanket, soft as petals, is circling back soon and i’ll re-regulate again.

the needle of the colour wheel hovers most frequently over blush, not the scarlet or amber or cobalt blue. not the fluorescent white of that a&e waiting room, either. it’s an imperfect multitude, but it’s pretty as a picture.