I slept on the couch all night with a gray blanket and a kink in my thigh. Dreamed of telling recycled jokes about starlets and feeling like a fraud. I must have been in your city. Trying too hard. I woke up in a sweet ether of natural rousing, still dreaming of square footage and Spanish coved doorways. How many charming accoutrements equal a happy home?

I’ve been playing too much Words With Friends lately and it’s hard to cease the mental exercise. We lean back in the couch, in the dark, make room for Emaline Bloom the Cat to jump up and perch on our legs when she finally gets up the courage, and still I don’t stop. The movie is a slow comedy (is this what they mean by dramedy?) and I’ve plenty of time to spell with one mind and watch with the other. Eight letters, ten. And an insatiable need to make imaginary words in this imagined game. Focus on the challenging consonants. All the pay off is in the difficult to place. I have believed this my whole life.

Now you are gone away and the whole couch is mine. I spell out futures with the tiles of our respective lives. Stay. Go. Travel. Make a home. Run away. Trust. Sabotage. Risk. Relief. Sacrifices. Returns. Begin. Really begin to be happy.

I write and tell you that these weeks apart are deprived as the deep sea. Holding my breath, the lack of oxygen begins to distort and confuse my thinking. I know we need to get back to the top, but it’s hard to feel rational down here. It’s hard to remember how it feels to breathe and why we ought to fight for it. Topside, I’ll remember. I always remember and it always feels even better than the last first big breath.

It occurs to me, recently, that I am Not Getting Any Younger. Maybe I never hoped for anything that audacious, but I certainly believed in a sort of pause. A timeless continuity. Other than Lessons Learned, how have I aged in a dozen years? How am I not the exact same dusty girl who tumbled back in from the world four and a half years ago. Almost five, if you want to know, but I hate to write that. The thing about coming home is that it settles around you like unset cement. The habits and the safety, the Things you accrue and the money. And the weeks or months you meant to stay grow unwieldy around you, into years and now I am thinking and thinking: There’s a finite amount of time for adventures. For actively choosing a life and rushing in to it. Not everyone gets free.

It’s snowing again like cherry blossoms hatching. Like it will never, ever stop. And I am considering wet shoes and grinning cheek bones in the coffee shop, eavesdropping and worrying about the hearts of the people I love. Worrying about the women, for whom you can have a world of respect and admiration and still not know well enough to comfort. Women who don’t need comfort. Times are hard all around. And still we all keep going toward so many better ends. We might be the luckiest people who ever lived.

Headlong into a second cup of coffee, the one you never need, I am thinking over and under it all (like another multi-tasked word game) about the scent of oranges and where they grow. There’s only so much time left to waste. And you can make it anywhere.