I get up in the morning with Squire and have an egg on toast, usually a fried egg but I'm trying to be a little healthy so these days a boiled egg, sliced using a kitchen gadget. It's a popup toaster; I would prefer a toaster oven for almost everything except toast. I make coffee in a French press; I used to use a drip coffee maker but found that cleaning it was annoying plus the look of horror on my dearest coffee lover's face after she took a sip convinced me to upgrade. Milk and sugar these days, needing the extra sweetness in a bitter world, but usually just black. I put a spoonful of homemade cherry syrup in a glass of water and use that to choke down vitamin pills, including vitamin D which doesn't make a perceptible difference but maybe it makes some difference anyway. We watch 20 minutes of television while we eat breakfast as neither of us is very chatty in the morning. News commentary is great, good sitcoms are better.

After breakfast, dishes, and maybe tea, and then all the social media stuff that I should cut back on and don't. Someone's wrong on the internet and I can't start working until I've seen it all. I don't read the news regularly anymore because it messes me up; sometimes I fall down an internet hole of researching something meaningless but at least it doesn't leave me with catatonic nihilism. Every day I think I should quit and every day I read at least one thing that makes me want to keep going, keep connecting. The traveling bookstore off on another adventure. My friend's daughter's Halloween costume ideas. An article about grief. People I have loved and am far away from, people I haven't met and have come to love, remember when we had to make dates to meet by mail?

Then work. Work and then a snack and then work and green tea, a cigarette break, and then work more. I love what I do although lately I feel like it's harder and harder to focus, my brain keeps skittering off into different directions, as if trying to swim through a heavily salted sea, constantly bouncing back up to the surface, on my back watching seagulls and clouds despite my desire to sink beneath the surface, tranquility and coral and marvelous fish always beyond my reach.

Sometimes I meet a friend for lunch and sometimes for afternoon coffee. It's the best possible season now, fall that's really fall this year, with leaves dying in all colors of a fire and leaving marvelously crunchy piles to kick through. Also scarves. In May when we went to New York for a wedding I bought a leather coat in a secondhand store and every time I wear it I am with my sister, my son, my now-married friends in love, Adirondack chairs. The buttons on the coat are a little loose and I should sew them on better at some point, though I'm not sure if special needles or something are required; I've never sewn through leather. In the afternoon if I'm not out I send invoices, check the internet pools to see if I've caught any fish, nap if I can. Do laundry, write email, stay useful.

In the evening I finish the work I dithered over during the day or sometimes I go out. There are friends who can't drink me under the table but then I can't seem to get them under the table either so we sit there with the bottle on the table in front of us and tell each other increasing truths until one of us realizes it's well past time to go home and goes. Some evenings there are open mic nights or theater rehearsals that may or may not involve some or several of the same friends and the same realizations. Some evenings I laugh so hard I think I might not stop, and some evenings I cry the same way.

At night I clean up because it's nice to wake up in a clean home. I brush my teeth and put on enough night-cream to resemble a 50s cartoon of a woman. I fall asleep as soon as I've packed the pillows around me or I fall asleep reading and wake up 30 minutes later to turn off the light. Sometimes I wake up in the night and lie there paralyzed by anxiety I can't name for an hour or two; sometimes I sleep through until the sun filters through the cracks between the curtains.

We changed the clocks last night. There is nothing that interesting about my life, but it seems very satisfying to me. I feel like the world is going to end soon and I try not to think about it but it's a factor in some decisions: If the world ends, will I regret having not done this? Mostly my life is things that I have chosen, things I want. And I get that you don't want it, because if you wanted it you'd only need to reach out your hand. I am really usually okay with that, because it's hardly new, but sometimes it stings behind my eyes and I look at my day from the outside and think: What's not to love? Don't answer that. 

Imagine that you were robbed. Not today, not right this minute, but that you were robbed. I guess that correctly you have been robbed; it's happened multiple times. That you were shoved into a dark alley, pushed against a wall, and told to hand over your money, which you did. Imagine that you didn't scream. Imagine that you did, and it didn't change anything. Imagine this happening multiple times, times where you said "No, I don't want to give you my money" and they walked away while you stood dumbfounded at your success; times when you said the exact same words and they took something more valuable, something harder to replace than money. Imagine you were robbed in Prague and didn't even know it until the next day, and people told you to carry your money in another pocket, travel in groups, or don't travel at all. They got your camera too that time, all those memories taken from you. Imagine that you have friends who were robbed at gunpoint and so when it finally gets to the point where you are able to talk about the times you've been robbed you feel like: well, yes, I was definitely robbed, but they were more robbed. You try not to make these comparisons out loud in the company of people who were robbed; you try not to make the comparisons in front of many people at all. Are there degrees of violation? You had something that you did not want to give someone else and they took it from you and that was not fair and the unfairness of it is the part of the conversation that is interesting. It seems like a lot of people who were never robbed have ideas about what it means but that's okay, you know what you know, and your friends know too. Imagine that someone comes at sits at the table with you and your friends. Imagine them describing having put a dollar on the table and someone picked it up. Were they robbed? Is it even the same word; can it be. Probably it's the same, probably it feels the same. I was robbed, she insists. Sure. In your mind, you're back in that alley, a strong hand at your throat, rats chattering around you, and all you want to be is anywhere but there. So if you want to know how this feels, if you want to know what I think, imagine that. 

Here in the center there is a girl who is dancing exactly the way she is supposed to. The directions are given and she follows them. She's doing what's expected and she knows she is because everyone is laughing, everyone is delighted. She dances more and more, harder and harder, to please the people. If they like a little, they will like a lot. You can see her thinking this, or you imagine you can. Stick your tongue out, say the words, and she sticks it all the way out, she wants to do well, she wants to please, she wants everyone to be happy. When they are happy, that is like being loved. She looks ridiculous, but they keep laughing and she keeps going. Behind her there is another child who isn't moving, who doesn't know how or doesn't want to follow directions. That's okay. Some people love music differently. When she looks over her shoulder she sees that behind her there is another child who dances a little, but not as well as our girl does, since nobody is cheering for her. Probably she gets love another way. It's later then that she notices the child next to her. The child next to her is covering her face. In her exuberance at being the center of attention she has failed to notice what falls outside the circle, and what falls outside the circle is crying. 

In this story you are the girl who is dancing. In this story you are the child who is not dancing, which is also an option. In this story you are the grandmother, laughing with delight, sharing the video with friends with famous people; "what a little actress!" you say. In this story you are the child who is crying.

There is delight and absence, there is laughter and there are tears. There's a lot of empathy for those feelings; you have a lot of empathy. What you don't understand is why nobody is comforting the child covering her face, why she's in the front row when she clearly doesn't want to be there. Surely there are adults making decisions here: a decision to put her there, made worse by decisions to film it, decisions to not help. You think of other situations where children are filmed and nobody helps. Can you imagine that? You find that you cannot. You wonder if it's the same kinds of people all the time, and you find that you suspect that it is. 

I sat next to fat people and thin people and medium people and I never took the elbow rest even though I thought a few times that maybe I deserved it. I figured out a way to drink beer and not get sick. I saw the ocean and swam in a pool which is thoroughly the opposite of what I would expect of myself. I thought a lot about what makes me laugh, and I laughed over and over. I cried a fair bit, though less than usual. I lived in the moments I was in, mostly. I watched a goodly amount of excellent television and a little not so good television. I bought a coat and boots and sweaters and went to cold places twice, on purpose. I ate so many oysters — so much seafood in general, as if the ocean was working to delight me and it was my job to be delighted. I was. I ate in front of a fireplace and my face and my heart were equally warm. I spent a day in beautiful and strange places I hadn't been, dimly recalling a language I had once been fluent in. I drove past animals and listened to Christian music that I didn't immediately recognize, then turned the radio off in horror and sang all the words to the songs I can still remember from those stretches of California that don't have radio stations. Cole Porter. Eurythmics. I tried to talk to you but you had headphones on. I slept in rooms without curtains, rooms without windows, rooms without heat, rooms without beds. Mostly I slept under quilts. I interacted with pets and generally enjoyed it. I watched someone being eaten alive by a feeling and finally understood that I do the same thing: it's not eating until you're full but eating like a fire that will consume as long as you feed it. I rode back and forth on the ferry and bought neither apples nor pears but was perfectly happy. I saw people I have loved in various intensities and at a range of distances for decades, and loved them more purely and simply and closely than ever. I did so many of my favorite things. I drank up all your wine.