Light a candle.

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

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.

Practice eye contact.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

“So look at yourself and start to live again”