At five o’clock I have to consciously dial myself down before reentering the house, like astronaut Buzz Aldrin preparing to unload the dishwasher immediately after returning from the moon. Don’t talk about the moon, I remind myself. Ask everyone how their day was.

“The initial reaction isn’t the eternal reaction.” This was a thing from a Jungian self-help book that we often told each other when our partners fucking hated us.

That was always my underlying fear: that someone I loved would look at me like a stranger. Or that I would take such a circuitous path away from someone that I could never find my way back to them.

“Everyone thinks doggy style is so vulnerable,” Jordi said, “but it’s actually the most stable position. Like a table. It’s hard to be knocked down when you’re on all fours.”

Or that I would take such a circuitous path away from someone that I could never find my way back to them.

Nobody knows what’s going on. We are thrown across our lives by winds that started blowing millions of years ago.

I tried to remember how Pinocchio had become a real boy. It had something to do with being in a whale, maybe saving his father’s life; I hadn’t done anything like that. But surely a woman was more complex than a puppet boy and she might become herself not once-and-for-all but cyclically: waxing, waning, sometimes disappearing altogether.

I was entirely known and I thought: This is the happiest moment of my life. And with that sentence came tremendous sorrow because nothing was more fleeting than a dance—dance says: joy is only now.

I’m forever wanting to know what it feels like to be other people. What were we all doing? What the hell was going on here on Earth? Of course none of these artifacts really amounted to anything; it was like trying to grab smoke by its handle. What handle?