Looking At How Long Mila's Hair

Tiffany can tell how the time was passing by looking at how long Mila’s hair is. A beautiful orange-yellow coat of good-looking long straight silky fur. Tiffany runs her fingers through it, but they get stuck in the little whorls and eddies of strands. She notices the seasons passing through it. In spring her fur was like a soft fuzz of baby leaves but then it became stubbly and itchy and stiff in the summer. Shiny and glossy it became in the fall, with the color of a bright new copper penny, and pure and clean in the winter, when it became a bleached peach color. Tiffany wonders, how long will it take for spring to come again since, after that, all the colors are blanketed by snow. It was hard to distinguish the asleep world from the awake
She spent a lot of time with doctors while she was not napping— that’s what her little sleeps are called, as she remembers. They were nice but a little empty. She would close her eyes and— blink, light, and a flicker and then light again. She didn’t recognize when the people were gone sometimes. She learned how to be a smart home schooled girl. In the hospital, she would learn tons of big words like “genetic” and “chronic” and “untreatable” and “narcoleptic” and the most common ones, “fatigue” or “sleep.” She wondered how much she slept, and if it was that long, then how was everyone awake all the time. She almost couldn’t remember the last time she was awake while her parents were sleeping. She liked to color a scratch book of hers and make amusing designs as well as read fiction books.
Suddenly, her body becomes heavy; she becomes numb to the sounds, low thrum feeling like she is being pushed down into the deep ocean, floating away as she sees how bubbles come out from her mouth and nose.
She opens her eyes and looks through the window. Mila is waiting for her outside; wagging her long tail as fast as it can possibly go. She barks and, like a bull preparing to charge, waits for Tiffany to throw her the ball she picked from the grass. She throws the ball, and Mila runs across the field to get it. When she returns she lets out a pleading whine, high at the beginning with a question note at the end.
“Let’s go for a
When she wakes up back in the hospital, she knows she will be hungry, thirsty or very weak as if she were made of jelly. Her head feels very heavy, and she wishes she could take it off while she is sitting up. Medicine— pills to swallow down with a big glass of water— and yucky vegetables that come with a dry grilled chicken breast. She understands that is the price she has to pay since her adventures require a lot of energy. She has gotten used to the needles that go into her arm and as her mom explained to her, they give her big amounts of nutrients that will allow her to play. The hospital was her nightmare and the real world is where Mila exists. Whenever Tiffany opens her eyes, her bedmate opens her shiny hazel eyes too—a lot, as Tiffany knows, like her own. She feels happy about Mila being always there for her. She wishes her mom and dad could come all together to live amazing adventures with Mila as well. They would fight cats or go to school to become knights or travel around the world; Tiffany and Mila would meet TV characters and eat giant ice creams without grown-ups stopping them. Most of their adventures took place on the