Two volunteers at the airport information desk, sharing a huge bag of cheese-dusted popcorn, making calls for me when I can’t get my phone onto the internet. Eating crabs, the violence and tenderness of it. Meeting people who remember me after a year. How old people’s hands are elegantly gnarled with experience. Trying new things. Thinking about art that is only meant to please one person, and the satisfaction of making it and being pleased. Reading a book I’ve put aside for decades and the way it feels to read fiction, eyes sliding across the page, conjuring colors, tasting words that fit together. How very tall buildings can look when you are also in a very tall building, different from when you gaze up from a sidewalk or look down from a plane. Moments when I feel the intensity of the lies in a country at war, moments when I see people capitulating, moments when I see resistance. How negative experiences are positively transformed when they are shared. Art that is luminous, translucent as butterfly wings, floating on puffs of air, on breath. Art you’ve seen before and get to appreciate anew. Reminding myself that it’s right, important even, to find beauty anywhere. How it feels to be humored, to be treated generously, how it feels to lean into warmth. Eating ice cream in the cooling night air which even so melts almost faster than you can eat. It is sunny and hot, then the air crackles with electricity, we reach out our hands and catch the first drops of rain before we run for shelter. I have wounds and I am presented with bandages. It’s only been a week and I have laughed so hard I had to stop to catch my breath, I have cried, I have yearned for things, I have been given more than I thought to request.