Seeking Rapture: A Memoir. Kathryn Harrison

kept in first-aid kits that causes a reeling, sweaty nausea that made me wish I were dead.

      My grandmother and grandfather, sixty-two and seventy-one at my birth, were now old enough that their ebbing energy granted me freedom unusual for a teenager. Losing their sight, they did not see my thinness. Deaf, they never heard me in my bathroom. By the time I was sixteen and a licensed driver, they sometimes depended on me to buy groceries, and en route to the supermarket I would stop at the mall. ‘Where did you go, Kalamazoo?’ my grandmother would ask when I returned, trying to understand why I was hours late. Sometimes she accused me of secretly meeting boys; she used the word assignation.