David had understood that.
He’d loved hearing about my days because every day was a story, and every story was about the same thing underneath, which was the lengths people would go to for something they loved. He used to sit on the counter in our Portland kitchen while I cooked dinner and say, “Tell me about the parrot,” or “Tell me about the sock,” or “Tell me about the three-legged dog.” I would tell him, and he would listen the way certain people listen when they’re not just hearing you butreceivingyou. By the time I was done talking, dinner would be cold and David would be laughing.
And I would feel, for those few minutes, that the world was a place that made sense.
Nobody had asked me to tell them about my day in two years.
I closed up Room Three and checked on the parking lot kitten, who was sleeping and breathing steadily with its blue splint intact. Then I updated my charts and said, “Good night,” to Debbie, who told me to eat something that wasn’t over a sink andto sleep before midnight, both of which I agreed to, though neither of which I expected to follow through on.
I was fairly certain she knew both to be true.
I drove home in the seventeen minutes of quiet that bookended my days.
My apartment was empty. Benji was at work, and my space had that particular quality of held breath that it always had when he was gone, as though the rooms were waiting for something to fill them.
Hiro greeted me at the door, tail wagging, his bad days becoming less frequent in a way I was cautiously allowing myself to accept. Potato was on the couch. General Tso was on the refrigerator. The kittens were in the bathroom and, based on the silence, had not yet mounted that day’s escape attempt.
I fed everyone according to the whiteboard, then I made dinner for one.
I ate at the island, washed the plate, and made tea.
Then I sat at my desk, opened my laptop, and looked at the two documents sitting side by side.
The David chapter, unfinished.
And the other document, the one I’d started after the night at Barbacks. It was untitled.
I opened the David chapter and reread the last paragraph I’d written, the one about the light on the water and the fish tacos and the way Davidhad said something about how the sun looked different when you knew you were running out of afternoons to watch it. It was a good paragraph. It was honest and painful and true, and I couldn’t figure out how to write the next one because the next one was where David got in the car and we drove home and he fell asleep with his head against the window and I watched him and knew, without being able to name it, that this was his last good day.
I couldn’t write it.
I’d been trying for a month, and I couldn’t write it because writing it meant finishing it, and finishing it meant moving on, and moving on meant the book stopped being about David and started being about whatever came after, and I didn’t know what came after.
I had not known for two years.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
I closed the David chapter and opened the other document.
The paragraph about the bar was still there. It was the one I’d written the night I’d brought Benji his phone. I read it through. It was rough and unfinished. It didn’t belong anywhere yet. It was just an observation, a single paragraph about a man in a bar who was simultaneously performing and genuine. It was about the space between those two things wheresomething true lived.
I put my hands on the keys.
I thought about the parking lot kitten, hissing and biting with teeth too small to do damage, using the only weapon she had because the world was big and scary and she was alone and fear was all she knew.
Then I thought about Churro, swallowing a sock whole because he was a creature of impulse and joy and zero consequences.
I smiled, thinking about Captain the parrot saying, “Good boy,” for the first time after six months of “You never listen.” I could still see Mr. Henderson’s face when it happened.
Finally, I glanced down and watched Hiro sleeping. My mind drifted to that morning and seeing him eat from Benji’s hand one kibble at a time.
That’s when I started writing.
But not about the bar.
This time, I wrote about the clinic, about the daily parade of broken things that came through my door. I wrote about the people who brought them, terrified and hopeful in equal measure, trusting me to fix what they couldn’t.
Mostly, I wrote about the way love looks when it’s scared, which is usually ridiculous and always brave.
