The other day I got a bloody nose when someone ran into me on the street, and that night another filling fell out while I was brushing my teeth. The year is not failing to fuck with me, by minor and major degrees.

A few weeks ago my husband and I received some awful news. I wept from that afternoon into the next morning, and afterwards, we got on with it. I boxed up a particular dream and put it away. We got on with it, like so many other people do.

But I tire more often these days. Books can't hold my interest, full of words like strange shadows locked in ice. I'll only watch TV, smoking cigarette after cigarette, and it's usually stories about children battling monsters, extradimensional or human, and it's always the adults who are the worst, and it's true, isn't it, what with Boris and Donald and the dudes on the street with their fucking, incessant, overwhelming sense of entitlement.

I wish I could care enough to write letters. To write, period. To call friends. To feel joy for other people's joy: muditā. Who said the opposite of depression was not happiness, but vitality?

And what is the wellspring of vitality? Hope, a positive sense of futurity.

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