finds herself bedridden and isolated for months, confined to the four walls of a strange room far from home, debilitated by a severe relapse from a mitochondrial myopathy, with only a simple gastropod, a snail, as her daily companion. Loneliness and loss mar this existence, but the snail brings her comfort and purpose and a growing insight into the human condition, even long after returning the snail to its native habitat.After being transported from the woods, the snail had emerged from its shell into the alien territory of my room, with no clue as to where it was or how it had arrived; the lack of vegetation and the desert-like surroundings must have seemed strange. The snail and I were both living in an altered landscape not of our choosing. I figured we shared a sense of loss and displacement.Each morning there was a moment, before I had fully awakened, when my mind still groped its clumsy way back to consciousness, my body not yet remembered, reality not yet acknowledged. That moment was always full of pure, sweet, uncontrollable hope. I did not ask for this hope to come; I did not even want it, for it trailed disappointment in its wake. Yet there it was, hovering within me-hope that my illness had vanished with the night and my health had returned magically with daybreak. But that moment always passed, my eyes opened, and reality flooded in; nothing had changed at all.
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