Life keeps delivering blow after blow. If there really is a balance between good and bad, we’re due to win the lottery soon. My sister’s therapist says to allow ten minutes each day to indulge in pure, seething rage. I try it. Annoyingly, I still find upsides everywhere. Things could be worse, I think. Black mold in our apartment deepens our friendships. Living so far from family makes us prioritize each other more. Stress strengthens our marriage. I just want to be mad.

I don’t understand the point, I lament to my sister. One day, Mimi agrees, we’ll look back on this year and wonder how we got through it. 

Maybe life can’t be quantified into neat equations. Sometimes bad things just happen and there’s no upside. Still, I have to believe that things sort themselves out eventually, at their own pace and in their own way. My husband is suspicious of a cosmic plan. But how else could I carry on?

I try to think of something to write. I grind coffee beans. I cut my hair. I water my plants. I move my body. I think about dogs. I do my work, the work that pays bills but isn’t really important. I think about how I don’t really want to work more than I already do. 

I write a few pithy lines. I check zillow for the fourth time in as many hours. I eat chocolate covered pretzels. I go to the library. I facetime my sister. I listen to the elephant thunder around upstairs. I make tea. I read texts and forget to respond to them. I dream of places I can’t go and people I can’t see. 

I try to write some more. I clean the kitchen and sweep the floor. I go for a walk. I watch the clouds. I read a few pages of a book that doesn’t hold my attention. I think about washing my hair. Surely there must be some sense to be made out of all this.

Dearest husband, I love you, but it’s too hot to even think about food. 

May I suggest we trade places with a bee and drink the landscape instead? Perhaps for dessert we could find a sweet patch of clover.

But if you’re going to the store anyway, a plump peach would be nice, maybe a dark, juicy plum too. If flowers won’t do, stone fruit can be a compromise.

Some avocados too, please, not too soft and not too hard; don’t worry about bread, I’ll make a loaf of sourdough.

Wait—what if we scrapped the list and moved to the country and never had to go grocery shopping ever again because everything we could want grew outside our windows? We could open the glass and reach out and pluck a sun-warmed apricot and eat it dripping over the sink. We could adopt a colony of bees and start a commune.

Maybe it’s not hard to discover new ways to live after all.

While you were gone I buried my nose in the lilac bushes and thought of our first home together. Do you remember it? The little cabin with the big windows and sloping floors, with the unfinished spare bedroom and the unruly lilac bush in the backyard? It wasn’t much but it was where we pledged our lives to each other. 

While you were gone I pierced my nose and made an offer on a house; our dog howled and I did at least thirteen crossword puzzles, so it’s safe to say both of us are lost without you. I’d never gone so long without talking to you. It felt like part of myself was missing, cliche as it sounds. Sometimes I scare myself on purpose, imagine things like what if everyone I loved disappeared, letting myself indulge in the tragedy before crashing back to reality—a twisted gratitude practice. There was a time last summer when I was convinced that all my problems would be solved if I were free and unencumbered. I realize now how wrong I was.

The sad and the scary loom large in the corners of my soul. I’ve thought before, I cannot be happy until those things go away. But that would be accepting defeat. Look, the peonies are unfurling and my love has returned! Move over, calamity—there is plenty room in this life for joy, too.