I am gathering items for a birthday party to be: cans of silly string in bulk, balloons, water balloons, squirt guns, banners, floats. Come Saturday, I will just add pizza and cake.

I fell asleep on my stomach, in a patch of sunshine created between the shadows of two soaring elms. I was reading a novel, out in the back on the grass, and looking at old texts. They made me laugh, one about a dirty sock, and I thought of that night in May, when you reached over to take my hand while we walked along the Chicago river. I remember how the streetlights looked on the surface of the water, glistening in broken pieces, and the laughter from the wine bar we passed, and the way my feet felt in woven flats.

Every day I check on the progress of the decomposing deer skeleton that has washed ashore just down the beach. Tufts of fur cling to parts of the hind leg near the sharp onyx hoof, but it’s mostly bone that is exposed. The lower jaw is lined in teeth so infinitesimal they seem no more than the plastic tines on a Barbie hairbrush. The skull sprouts two devil-like protrusions that intimate the promise of antlers. The neck and head are still cloaked in plucked pale skin that is water-logged and stretched out. 

The 14-year-old said to the 19-year-old, “What if there were teacup koalas?” And at just the thought of it, the 19-year-old’s eyes brimmed with tears. They were tears for the hitherto unimagined mixture of cuteness, and the sudden desire for, and the total non-existence of the species in equal proportion. And tears because she wanted to hold a tiny koala up next to her cheek so badly; tears because she never could. 

“I’m happy,” he said. He feels peaceful, his whole body calm and sinking into me, both of us sinking into the chair. He becomes a totem for me, a quiet sacred object around which I circulate what I still know for sure. I can still care for him; he still comes with a schedule and boxes to check, his needs are still assuaged by morning hugs and daily chats and whatever I can fix him in the toaster and deliver to the couch.

I wake early enough that the birdsong is still soft and the light outside feels flat. Gray. I hear kids already playing out there, toddlers probably. Those little ones across the street who go to bed when it’s still light out and, these days, wake in the dark.

A week ago, the earth upended and the floor underneath me rolled. Somehow I felt it coming in the unease of the air, urgent at the window. It was warning me, but I didn’t know of what and felt only the encroaching fear and so had swallowed, the night before, a cocktail of dread and two pretty pink oval-shaped Benadryl that pulled me deeply into sleep.

It all started before it even started.

Nine pm the night before, and I’m all anxious. I’ve spent the day writing, sequestered away in my writing hovel of a room that overlooks the snow dusted Wasatch, drinking shots of espresso from miniscule sky blue ceramic cups, and moving from desk to chair to kitchen to toilet in a sort of quiet electric track. I was consumed by words—the New York Times, the local paper, texts and more texts, the Microsoft doc in front of me. Thoughts were heavy but full of hope, and I wrote and wrote, page after page, three times on the same essay.

I put on overalls again. Simply. Unceremoniously. Unfolding them from the pile of skinny denim and vintage 501’s and leggings—the costumes of different women who are all me. I love those women too—I love those coverings, but they’re not right for today. Today I slipped the overalls on so effortlessly, the cotton worn soft from years of work and wear that it barely touched the dry skin of my legs.