The first day, Rory only comes out of their room once.

She’s grey eyed, messy in an overlarge sweatshirt and threadbare joggers. There’s crust in her eyes and at the corner of her mouth, and her topknot is matted. She’s overwrought, threadbare. Dana’s heart hurts just to look at her. But she showers, and changes, and lets Dana comb her hair into neat braids to keep her from freezing in her drafty room, and that’s a victory.

The second day, Rory takes her meds all on her own. She lines them up along her headline—vitamin D gels next to chalky iron pills next to Vyvanse next to Zoloft—and downs all four in a swallow, like it’s a party trick. It’s funny, it’s fucked up. Dana doesn’t blink as she claps.

The third day, Rory wakes up, eats, and then sleeps for thirteen hours straight. Dana goes to three classes, and doesn’t talk to anyone at all.

Februaries are hard.

In hindsight, Dana should’ve known what was coming. It started in the dregs of January, with skipped classes and uncooked meals and a full day a week where Rory just couldn’t do—couldn’t clean her room, couldn’t grab her laundry, couldn’t leave the apartment. It was like a weight was bearing down on her, unmovable. Dana watched, and sympathized, and thought she understood.

She didn’t.

Dana met Rory in March.

She was a hell girl with cocksure hands and the darkest brown eyes Dana’d ever seen. Dana didn’t believe in love at first sight, but she believed in something.  Rory was a whole lot of something.

It started ordinary—coffee dates and movie dates and let-me-cook-you-dinner and let-me-walk-you-home and a kiss in the glow of the porch light, Rory’s hands fisted in the sweater Dana bought to impress her, standing on her toes to get the angle right, and the small way she breathed when Dana found her hips. They were nineteen and they weren’t in love but it was something by the clumsy fistful, and it was theirs.

And then February came, and Rory hardly called, and when she did it was in this humdrum little voice that invited no love, no interest, no something.

Halfway through the month, Rory explained.

“Februaries are hard for me,” she said on fourteenth, in a red dress and rumpled hair, twisting her hands in a blanket. “I didn’t know it’d be this bad.”

“What do you mean, hard?”

And that was when Rory started to cry.

Dana cried with her, that night, curled up on Rory’s bad couch in her crowded room, and held onto her till the sun broke the horizon.

And then it was March again, and Rory reappeared in a dazzle that razed the ground under Dana’s feet, left her trembling and newborn. Spring made Rory fitful, excited. She’d come up behind Dana while she brushed her teeth, look at their mismatched images, twined in the mirror—Dana, green-eyed and ginger, set against Rory’s dark hair and the the freckles on her fawn nose.

“Come home with me,” she’d sing, joking, and then serious. “My mom wants to meet you.”

Who was Dana to say no?

Dana loved her by then, she knew. It’d grown deep, not reaching into her bones so much as sprouting from the marrow—a calcium-rich, solid thing that expanded with Dana’s ribs. So that summer, she went to Austin, and met Rory’s mom, and was charmed over home-brewed beer and three little sisters and Grace’s stolid presence on the back porch. If Dana had any say in it, they’d never leave. Rory came alive here in ways that only New York in the summer could coax out of her.

She’d sat with Grace, on their last night, watching Rory teach Elle, the only sister that hadn’t hit double digits, to catch fireflies.

“She’s great with them,” Dana said.

Grace hummed, pleased. She looked so much like Rory, down to the freckles. It was like looking in a funhouse mirror.

“She loves her sisters. It wasn’t always easy for her, you know, growing up.”

“Because of the age difference?”

“No.” Grace bit off a laugh. “She wanted to be a big sister for as long as I could remember. No, because of the depression.”

Oh.

“Oh,” Dana said. She took an awkward sip of her beer. Grace watched.

“You know about it, right? She said you’ve been together for about a year.”

“Ten months, yeah,” Dana said, then blushed. “She told me about it last February.”

“Hm, February.” Grace nodded like it all made sense. “Februaries are hard.”

“She said the same thing.”

“When she was in high school, there were weeks where I had to drag her out of bed. And she’d cry like her heart was breaking. Like she didn’t know what to do. It was hard,” Grace said. The stars winked overhead, like lightning bugs in a great jar. “For both of us.”

“How do you deal with it?” Dana asked.

Grace knocked her head to the right, considering. Then she said, “Together.”

The next day, Grace’d hugged her goodbye, and said, “Look out for her. Yeah?”

And Dana’s trying, alright? She’s trying. But Grace was right. It’s hard. And whenever Rory doesn’t come out of their room, or looks at Dana like a void, Dana just feels alone.

But then Rory will smile, wan and not-effortless at all from under her weighted blanket, and all the love Dana’s got’ll crash into her ribs, DOA.

On the fourth day, she coaxes Rory into the kitchen, makes her sit at the table, and feeds her soup and crackers. Rory of a month ago would tolerate it with a wry-fond smile, glitter-eyed and teasing. She’d call Dana ‘Smother,’ and then kiss her eyelids, dance her around the island in a bad waltz. But that was a month ago, and now Rory eats her soup with this nothing-stare, and Dana wants to scream.

She crawls into Rory’s bed that night, tucks her nose into the soft-dark hairs at her nape, and cries quiet.

Some days are good. Some days Rory gets out of bed and reads and goes outside to get the sun on her cheeks. Some days they go to trivia night with their friends, and Rory helps Dana finish the fishbowl she shouldn’t have ordered and leans under her arm and makes bad dad jokes ’til Dana snorts.

Then there are days that are okay—in between. Rory’ll get up before noon, she’ll eat, she’ll put on real clothes and sometimes she’ll go to class. She slithers through, wan but present. By the end, she’s exhausted. Most days are like this.

And some days are awful. Some days Rory doesn’t go out at all, doesn’t read, doesn’t make a single stupid joke. Some days Dana sits with her and her nothing-stare as they watch sitcoms that a month ago would’ve sent Rory rolling. On those days, Dana wants to scream. It builds, cracking against her molars, until she’s crying in her car because she wants to help she wants to do something and she can’t. Oh, she can cook, she can clean and force Rory to shower, she can drag Rory on a walk around the block, but she can’t fight the bad in Rory’s brain.

Dana is just—lost. And stupid-feeling. She doesn’t know how to tell Rory I’m terrified without it sounding like an accusation, doesn’t know how to say I miss you because nothing’s gone. Rory’s right there, and Dana’s such a piece of shit for wanting the old Rory—the one with the sure hands and the knowing looks and the little spark of creative insanity that drove her to buy brand new wicks to remake Dana’s favorite candle that kept sputtering out.

On the tenth, they fight.

It starts over something stupid—Rory finally takes all the dirty dishes out of their room, dumps them in the sink, and turns around again, and Dana just—

Explodes.

The worst part is that they don’t do this, they don’t fight like this, cutting deep, cutting dirty, balls to the wall and mean. They just don’t. Because Dana has to be patient, and Dana has to be kind, and Dana has to be so fucking understanding but sometimes it’s like she’s not even a person, like she’s a dog playing an always game of fetch and Christ, Christ, she’s so sick of wanting and needing and feeling like scum for it. She shouts all of this at Rory, and then she leaves.

It’s not for long, just to take a walk around the block, just to buy a pack of menthols and tear through the whole thing. But by the time she gets home, the apartment is spotless.

And Dana just deflates. Bangs her head against the doorway. After she showers and brushes her teeth ’til her gums bleed, she goes to their room.

Rory’s sitting up in bed, her hair in a wet bun, wearing a threadbare shirt that Dana can’t remember started out as whose. She’s showered too.

“I used some of your conditioner,” she says. “I’m sorry. I’ll pay you back.”

“That’s okay,” Dana says quietly as she dresses. Rory’s sweats, because they’re clean-smelling and soft, and Dana hasn’t had the opportunity to wear them in so long.

“No,” Rory says. “It’s not. C’mere.”

She pulls Dana onto the bed, folds them up so they’re criss-cross applesauce, holding hands and facing each other like they’re in a meditation class. Or in couples counseling.

“Dana,” Rory says. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t,” Dana shakes her head. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

Rory smiles like she’s breaking her own heart. “Sweetheart, we both know that’s not true. I’ve been leaning on you way too much. I think I forgot, for a while there, that just ‘cause you look like you have your shit together doesn’t mean you signed on for this.”

“I signed on for you,” Dana promises. “All of you.”

She did, because she loves Rory. She loves her and loves her and loves her.

“Yeah.” Rory nods. “But—Jesus, I don’t know how to say this. Dana, you do so much for me. More than I ever meant to ask of you. And it’s not fair that I’ve just been taking advantage of that. This, all of this…you haven’t been okay. And a lot of that’s on me. My support system can’t just be you and my therapist. That’s not fair to you.”

“What are you saying?” Dana asks.

Rory falters. Chews on her lip. “I’m gonna go to a support group. Once, maybe twice a week. Get out of the apartment. I’m gonna try to be better about dishes. I’m gonna try to be better.”

“Rory, I don’t mind—”

“You do.” Rory grins then, like Dana just told a joke. “Honestly, so do I. I don't want to be a blob, Dana. Not for me, and not for you.”

Maybe it’s shameful, but just about then, Dana wants to sob from relief. Rory smiles, knocks their foreheads together. “Love you,” she says.

“Love you too,” Dana says.

That night, Rory is the one that holds her.

On the fourteenth, Rory buys her a box of chocolates, and Dana cries.

Group helps. Rory goes to her doctor, changes her meds, and that helps. First, though, it  makes her throw up for a few days as she gets used to the new dose. One day, Dana comes home from coffee with her friends to find Rory studying for a test with a sun lamp shining on her face.

“Baby, you’ll go blind,” she giggles, tucks a kiss behind Rory’s ear.

“Gotta get that sunlight, homie,” Rory mutters, then sings, “Sunliiiiggghhht!” in a weird, Michael Jackson sort of voice.

Some days Rory talks like she can’t stop, like she’s conducting an exorcism. She talks about how shit she feels and she talks about how tired she is and she talks about how bad she wants to just get up, and how she can’t. She talks until she cries, and Dana strokes her hair and holds on and remembers that Rory’s fighting, all the time, with her head, and that most of the time she’s winning. It’s just that Februaries are hard.

But things have been better, lately. Rory’s been trying, and so has Dana, to be less code pendently…RoryandDana. They go out on their own. They lead separate lives. And Dana’s more content, more at ease when she comes home to Rory, lounging on the couch with a friend from class or group, smiling like she means it.

“Thank you,” Rory says one day, sort of random, when they’re lying in bed on the twenty-second. Six days left in the hell month, and Rory’s good days are starting to outweigh her bad. She and a few people from group had invited Dana out to a dance club tonight.

“For what?” Dana says.

“Taking care of me, when it gets bad.”

Dana smiles.

“You’re welcome.”

The next six days are good.

And on the seventh, Dana wakes at nine to the smell of spiced meat and onions, to the sound of Rory’s weird playlist and the muttered way she sings.

It’s March.