Ten. Seven Hundred & Eighty-Six

1. Light a candle.

2. I will not make myself feel guilty for giving myself the gift of ease in the mornings.

3. I press the celery through the slot. Out comes a vibrantly green juice. That’s a lot of celery for just one glass of juice. They all make faces at me.

4. Practice eye contact.

5. It has a crack running through it but I stick it into the CD player just to try. A flood of memories washes over me with every song that comes on. I sit in the parking lot of the grocery store until the song is over.

6. It’s not that it’s hard, it’s that it’s tedious and thus time consuming. Inefficient. The more I do the more questions I have and the more pressing the need for a new process is.

7. We finally get to catch up on the phone. Ah, that North Carolinian accent. She mentions a few names and it all comes flooding back. We talk about the ways in which people can change; how time surprises you; how crazy it is that we haven’t seen each other in so long. How long has it been? Almost 15 years.

8. 94 degrees feels pretty good after you’ve had a long stretch of 100.

9. There is the silhouette of Mt. Diablo and the hills below it are glowing a pinkish-gold under the setting sun. There is the sound of rustling palm trees and the ping of balls hitting bats.

10. “So look at yourself and start to live again”