I find myself holding my breath a lot of the time, usually while doing chores or staring at my screen, at work or editing an essay. I will feel tense all over, and touch my stomach, as if something was trying to break out, and then I’m like, oh, exhale.

I have modest goals (because when you forget to exhale you must have modest goals). One of them is to write for 30 minutes a day, or to write 150 words. Another aim is to read at least 10 pages a day.

No matter how modest a goal it is, reaching 150 words is still hard. “It feels like I start every day knowing absolutely nothing." I wrote this sometime last June, and it still holds true. I don't know what I'm writing about. Flowers, books, walking at night, melancholy, feelings and lost friendships. They all fall away at times, and then there's only this abyss. Last June, I'd go out every day and identify plants (see modest goals), documenting their names in the back of my diary. Wall rue, maidenhair fern, bitter dock, pennywort, herb robert, buttercup, cowslip, elderflower... Throwing the world into the abyss, what was me, I suppose. I'd recompose myself, with leaves and buds, spires and spikes, moss and fern. I was rooted, again, in old stone walls, fuzzy ditches, and whorled fields, in the landscape, in time.

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