Summary

Chapter 17 is titled “A Come-to-Justin Meeting.” The author prologues this chapter with a description of the dense, dark, tangled forest she used to love exploring as a child. She also describes how she used to swing on vines like Tarzan, and how swinging forward felt wonderful, but swinging backward made her ill.

The author then describes waking up alone in bed the morning after Jack left, seeing a mess and realizing she fell asleep with a chocolate bar in her hand. “Just because I’m not on fentanyl,” she comments in her narration, “doesn’t mean I don’t medicate” (200). But she manages to get herself out of bed and start following her list, realizing that she has just lost a couple of her important “people.” “I see my reflection best when it bounces off the ones I love,” she says in her...