An editor, could I persuade one to read this far, would correctly say, “where is the story?”

My weak reply: this is not a story but a marker. People will find it in the future, as they come across these pages, and they will see that after the water boiled and I drank my tea, I kept writing. 2004, 2005, 2006, 2020.

Other failures and successes in love and work will be marked on the same long tape of language, unspooling from its reel until cancer, or the nuclear suitcase, gives the Fates cause to snip it. I can look back at the last 6 years, the last 1000 attempts to put an idea into a string of words, and know that nothing is finished, that no matter how strong the sense of lost hope, there is always going to be sleep. And then rising, feet on the floor, blinking hard at the light coming in through the blinds. It is not enough, but it is enough for now.