I stretched my legs and did not cross my arms over me in any way. My arms hung by my side, relaxed.  The sun soaked into my chest, my skin, my arms.

It did not burn me. It warmed me.

I sighed and closed my eyes and listened to the ocean roar. The ocean defeated itself again and again against the shore.

My husband, three children, and parents continued on without me – their feet pressing against the aged wood planks of the board walk, their screeches and screams mushrooming against a rare blue sky. I felt the echoes beneath my feet. It was enough to witness, to know they were alive.

I told myself that it was okay, just for a moment, to be nothing.

I’d been fighting nausea, fatigue, and a gagging sort of cough for days, but in that moment, I let go of my ambitions, anxieties, and general need to be something…I was just a body sitting on a driftwood bench in a perfect patch of sunlight.

I sat and a squirrel climbed up on to the bench next to me.

I offered it a peanut.

It scampered into my lap.

Sat and ate the peanut and then waited for more.

So I did this thing for a while.

I held out peanuts to this twitchy creature. It climbed up on my lap. It ate. It discarded peanut shells all over the black leggings I’d borrowed from my mother. I closed my eyes. I let the sun soak into me. I listened to the ocean. I didn’t try to be anything other than a heart beating, a strange and illiterate universe defined by skin.

It was good.

At some point a couple sat down next to me clutching red plastic cups filled with wine. They were very pale-skinned. She had veins in her cheeks. His nose was swollen. They had kind spirits. They sat next to me without demanding anything, so I shared my peanuts with them. The woman coaxed a squirrel on to her lap. Her husband left at some stage. The woman and I sat in the sun. She drank her wine. I drank in the sun. We fed the squirrels. Every once in a while we said something to one another.

Eventually my children returned.

I put a small pile of peanuts next to the woman and said, “Enjoy the rest of your day.”
And that was that.

Sometimes I get it right.
Sometimes I get it wrong.

Tonight, I got it wrong.

Sol fought against me just enough that I thought to myself, “The worst is just about to pass, I’ll just hold on. I’ll just make a little joke.”
But I misjudged.

I held him a little too long and he began to panic. He told me he hated me and I let go in a sort of maternal horror.

Half an hour later he came back to me and apologized.

But still, those words stayed with me.

I was holding my boy to help him feel safe and part of allowing him to feel safe involved me feeling as though everything I’d done was wrong.

I needed to be hated to be loved.

I have a list of unnecessary homework piling up in my mind.

My husband sleeps next to our youngest and I know I should rest but I can’t.

In the middle of the night, one of them will either start snoring or kick me in the face.

One of them will tangle their fingers in my hair.

One of them will wake me up in the middle of a dream that has something important to tell me.

But this isn’t why I can’t sleep.

I need to write.

Sometimes, like tonight, I listen to the wise counsel of dear friends.

I realize I can’t be all things to all people.

I listen when they tell me that to attempt to do so only diminishes what I am meant to be. It spreads the energy that I have too thin; the energy that those who stand loyally next to me depend on.

Sometimes I am bold.

I steal down to write a few sentences.
I have faith that this will be enough to let my spirit rest.
Sometimes I believe that the universe is unfolding exactly as it should…

…whether I choose to trust it or not.

Where do I start?

Do I start with shoving my hip against our king-sized bed in frustration?

Piling clothes and blankets up like a growing mountain of all the things that don’t get put away unless I remain their diligent caretaker…the guardian of an endlessly multiplying array of things.

The small and broken.

The small and precious.

The small and only valuable for the attention my children give to them.

Do I say: I was trying to give my husband more time…I was trying to be a good wife and mother…but then my jaw started clenching, I started cleaning in that intense, focused way that I clean, when there is something else building inside of me.

I told him, “I need to get my assignments done tonight.”
He said, “Yep, I’m almost done.”
And then two hours passed.

The bed remains in the middle of the room. I was looking for a missing Tree-of-Life earring my mother sent me. It seemed particularly important, considering that my father told me tonight that my mother’s secondary cancer has been upgraded to cancer with a capital C. We spent a brief and superficial amount of time on skype processing the leukemia plus extra cancer.

My father and I take this sort of information to our private corners.

We process in our own way.

Do I say this to my husband?
Do I say, “Please, I need time. I need quiet. I need words.”

No.

I grit my teeth and throw things around and pick up the bodies of crickets from beneath the bed. I have a narrative unfurling in my mind about the cricket cemetery we have been sleeping above.

I find coins from all over the world. They’ve left marks in the carpet.

Beneath the stories I’m telling myself, I want to complain. Throw a tantrum.

I want to say to my beloved husband and best friend, “Our castle crumbles if I’m not patting the walls back into place and I don’t want to always be the one beating a flat-handed rhythm against our walls.”

At the point my heart begins to curl into a tight fist, Dan pulls himself away from the computer, and as soon as he is disconnected, he is there.

He is present in the way I needed him to be hours ago.

I know he can’t help the rhythm of his mind, the way it focuses, the time it takes to translate thoughts into sentences into emails.

I grab my glass of wine, balance my laptop, and Belicia weaves through my feet as I make my way down to the studio.

I sit with Belicia curled up beneath my feet and I find myself nurtured and disorientated by the quiet, the orderliness of this space that is almost all mine.

Where do I begin?

My children stampede through my mind.

Sol and his new tendency to walk around in a shirt and Spiderman undies because ‘it makes him comfortable’, and his constant request that I play basketball with him; these invitations into his life when I’m pulled in the direction of his brother and sister and father and the need to bring more money into all of our lives…all of it makes me squint as he walks away down the hallway, skinny legs leading up into a body that is beginning to look more and more like the teenager that will turn into a man.

Where do I begin?

With the student and her hair twirled between her fingers?

The way her eyes lit up when I walked over to her?

The way she quickly moved her backpack from the seat next to her and began looking for a pen and paper to lend to me…the shy smile…the small moments of honesty.

These sacred offerings we hand to one another without even realizing what we are doing.

Where do I begin?

I begin with the moment Dan trails his fingers along my spine before I head down to the studio.

I begin with the way he makes me feel beautiful because he sees me as I describe my third day at practicum… he really sees me, and he says, “Babe, I’m so proud of you. I knew you would fall in love with teaching.”

I begin with my children swarming around me, climbing up me, claiming me, tugging on me, surrounding me in everything and anything that will hold my attention for just a moment.

I begin with dreams of sharks; with dreams of their power sketched along my torso; slowly transforming into an ally not a predator.

I begin…

…and I begin again.

Again and again.

The land has been drying up but it feels like I’m swelling. My flesh continues to expand, absorbing all of the heat, making me cranky about the clothes I can’t comfortably fit into, the hours that squeeze me as I sit in a classroom, trying to take in layers upon layers of assignments, guidance on behavior management, and then, of course, pedagogy.

I shift in my seat. Feel my thighs stick together. I dream of saltwater and a lean body.

The first three weeks of my teacher training have left me itchy, pacing at the edges of my life; drinking a lot of wine, craving salt/grease, and  indulging in over-priced gluten-free cookies at the student cafeteria. Cookies that need to be dipped in bitter, poorly made mocha.

For those first few weeks it didn’t matter; there was something magical about those cookies and coffee. They hit my stomach and expanded. I laughed a little more freely with all of that chocolate and butter coating my insides. I felt just a wee more human and capable and less self-serious. It was a cookie and coffee sort of faith.

But by the end of the day, my skin would be pressing against the fabric of my clothes. I’d be angry at myself for not going to the gym with its poor air-conditioning.  My lack of enthusiasm about wading through shoddy equipment swarming with muscle-bound and self-assured sports science students, left me feeling like an introvert. I considered myself diminished because once upon a time I could wear shorts without feeling ashamed…but I’d try to ignore these thoughts because, really, I’m old enough to know better, right?

I’m evolved enough, right?
Uh. Nope.

I’d get home and climb out of my uncomfortable clothing. I’d be sticky, overheated, pissed off at the warm weather, and I’d get into my husband’s basketball shorts, something I could feel swallowed up in, smaller than myself….free, really, of myself and my body.

I haven’t felt this sort of conflict with my body since I was a teenager or in my early twenties. I’ve tried to surround this old enemy in intellect; circle it again and again in a tight little bundle and shove it far back in the closet of my self, like some sort of article of self that has been shamed and needs to be hidden.

But here I am tonight, writing about it. This is what comes out of me when I thought I would write about the unfurling dialogue between me and my children.

No, here I am, writing about my shame about being in a body I’ve betrayed.

I’ve been dreaming a lot about sharks.

There is an undeniable connection. Sharks that keep me from paddling out to waves are always a sign of the ways I’m letting anxiety and fear control my life.

And when I say dreaming  ’a lot’, what I mean is this:

I’ve been unable to get through a night without either; paddling out into deep waters populated by predatory shadows, or wandering into muddy waters and then being chased to shore.

Tonight, after many conversations with friends over this last week, not just friends, but MY people…my tribe…these are the people I can lay myself down in front of, arms flailed, and show my soft underbelly to…I’ve realized that I’m on a continuum.

My ill-fitting pants, my mean-spirited internal voice, my indulgence in foods that have capped my immune system at the knees? These are all elements working toward my greater good.

I dream of the life put in my hands; my garden, my chickens, my fish, my home,…

and when I stand in the landscape of my mind, unable to do anything but mourn, or fight back, I wake up in a cold-sweat and realize, again and again:

How do you get out of the noose?

Stop struggling.

Or, translated into the most primal fear lodged in my surfer-brain:

How do you keep from being eaten by sharks?

Stop thinking about them.
They are there, all the time.
So is death. In every moment we breathe.

This morning I listened to my husband’s heart. I wanted to scream because the vulnerable echo of it was almost too much for me to handle. But I took a deep breath. I let its rhythm move through me.

This is life.

On Monday, I’ll step into a stream of anguish and anxiety, of beauty and potential…I want to meet the girls of my first teacher practicum with this intention:

You brave creation. You are alive.
You’ve made it this far.

The rest?
It’s all about learning to paddle out with the shadow of sharks beneath you and look to the horizon, knowing that you’re just floating on the surface, somewhere in between here and there.

I see that line of color, dialogue, movement and think, “That needs to be held in the palm of my hand and remembered…”

This image of sailors and dark waters…those were just metaphors.

For example..

…last night, they invited me on to their sleek back and swam me out to the middle of the ocean.
Once there, I panicked, knowing my children were still on the shore. And despite my fear of sharks, I swam my way back to them, so they wouldn’t find themselves alone…

…and still…

…I regretted those moments they waited.

…I think:

Before my bones were knit

Together

In my mother’s womb

This dark, childhood forest

Of magic and splendor

Of fear and faith

Have been carved into the spiral

Of my DNA

But nevermind

What I want to say is this:

I am here to love

Not a flood that exhausts itself

Not a puddle

An ever-expanding ocean

A tide within its own timeline

A human that is able to say: You

I’ll roll your stone, your irritant, on my shore…
I’ll rename you:

Pearl

But only if you agree

Only if it is in

The spiral of your creation

To recognize this name

And say
yes

I’m beautiful

And then

I’ll hold you in my hand

I’ll protect you

I’ll wear you

Close to my throat

My heart

And worry you beneath my thumb and index

Whispering, “We are family”

You and I

This sand

This shell

This vast tide

Pushing us

Again and again

Against an eternal shore

I sit on the patchy grass and whistle to the ducks as I throw feed into their wading pool. I’m wearing Dan’s basketball shorts, an old tank top, and my hair is pulled back into a haphazard braid. I’m puffy-eyed and feeling old and too young all at once.

Old in the sense of beginning to understand that if you live long enough, death continues to shape your edges, soften them, inform them, until you no longer recognize the point when you transformed from an angle to a curve.

Today my parents wrote me to tell me that my first child, Daemon, was crossing over to the other side. I say ‘child’ because Daemon opened up something in my heart; a sense of being rooted to this world, of being responsible for something other than myself, even though she was the one who took care of me, who accepted her responsibility to me without fail…unless, of course, I threatened to get near her food dish. She did have certain lines drawn when it came to unconditional love.

I met Daemon when I was twenty-three. It was a different lifetime. I was sun-kissed, anxious, a tightly bound heart beating in my chest, but my muscles were strong, my lungs large, and my moments spread before me without boundary. We were driving away from a surf break stationed next to a light house and fish camp made of tarps, old caravans, discarded bits and pieces. Just before we were spit out from the bumping, dusty, irreverent road that took several hours to cover, Daemon came crawling out from a ravine filled with trash. Plastic bags, rotting meat and diapers…small piles on fire…aluminum glinting in the sunlight. My ex put on the breaks and his best friend gave him a look as I was already trying to open up the door from the backseat.

I remember it now, crouching down next to her, my ex looking worried because she was hairless and grey with filth. He looked to his friend and said something along the lines of,  ”I guess we now have a dog.”

I fed her avocado and held her to my chest. It didn’t occur to me to worry about the insects crawling across her skin. I just wanted her to survive.

I guess in those moments she was already teaching me things about myself that would take me years to understand – and that is what our truest friends and spiritual guardians do; they recognize us before we recognize ourselves.

I named my dog ‘Daemon’ after a character in a book. It meant a ‘spiritual familiar’ an extension of self.

Daemon has knocked me over, running up behind me, delighting in her speed, along the edge of the ocean in Baja. She has been shipped across the planet to New Zealand and back again, to retire with my parents. She has been with me from my transition of who I was to who I would become.

And today she transitioned to the other side in my mother’s arms.

As I’ve been engaging my sadness in all kinds of distracted activities, beneath the surface, I’ve been trying not to think of my failures as a person, but to think of the way our failings are the ways in which we become available for love in all of its forms.

I wanted to be there with my parents today and in the days to come. She has become a steady rhythm in their days, my daemon stretching across the planet. My spirit familiar. My guardian. My watchdog taking care of what is most important to me – my family.

But as the day has progressed, I’ve been thinking about death and love.

I’m thinking of the way the moments of the last month have wrapped itself around this event, wrapped until it only seemed natural that it was time – the event that was always far off in the future…it was now time.

Death is teaching me that we are created completely incomplete. We are meant to love with the abandon of knowing that we are an interlocking creation. When one piece crosses over before us, it teaches me that we are always, every moment, bridging two worlds…we are a thousand points of light emanating from the same source.

In the end, we are a sum total of what we loved and what chose to love us in return.

I finish feeding the ducks and return to the house to write this. My eyes are puffy and so is my heart.
But I’m grateful.
For all of it.

I’ve spent an hour in the dark, words running through my mind, ways to begin this anniversary gift to you. I dragged myself out of bed, out of the comfort of your feet pressed against mine, our youngest grasping my arm like a lifeline.

I’ve now spent another hour diving down, my mind spiraling through the images of the last nine years we’ve spent together. I have so many beginnings to this. I wanted to begin by listing my names for you – but it felt prefaced. I argued with myself about it.

And then I thought of a conversation with a beloved friend I’ve known since I was eighteen. She asked me, “How do you know? How do you know you’re with the right person, the person you’re meant to be with?”

I waved my hands a lot and stuttered a bunch of words that didn’t mean much. I wanted to give her something reassuring but I was distracted by the webcam image of myself doing these things and thought, “Wow, that’s a really strange angle of me. Oh well, I guess that’s what I look like in the end.”

But the question has remained with me; I’ve wanted to go back and say to my friend, “Here, this is what I meant to say…”

And even then, I realize that what I want to say keeps evolving. It has made me realize that what you’ve taught me, Daniel James Clarke, what you continue to teach me –  it is a gift that is as alive as our three children, their bodies bumping up against the walls of our home, their voices soothing and bickering in equal measure.

You’ve taught me that anything true is continually evolving but it can’t evolve without  faith and commitment.

I come across people proclaiming ideas like, “How can you expect me to commit myself to one person? There are so many people to love!” And I think, “Because when you commit to the right person, you understand how to love all others.”

But, my love, you’ve taught me so many things in the last 3,287 days. To be loved like you love me is a type of grace. It humbles me. Nine years later, I’ve stopped questioning why you love me and simply accepted it as a gift. It makes me a better person to be loved by you, to let myself fall in love with you, over and over again. Daniel James Clarke, you are the only person on this planet that continues to surprise me, in the best way.

Almost ten years ago, we found one another attempting to be brave. We were beautiful and didn’t believe it. We were broken and holding the pieces in front of us as we moved forward, a mosaic shield that threatened to fall apart in our hands, but we believed in it all the same.

We found one another and didn’t know who we would become, but we were together, and our bodies, recognizing one another’s scent, began to whisper to us about our future. I proudly tell people, “We were engaged six months after we met but if he’d asked me to marry him within the first month, I would’ve said yes.”

It’s true. We were looking for a house together before we’d admitted we wanted to spend our days growing old. I’ve told this story so many times before, and I hope I’ll be blessed with the opportunity to tell it a thousand times again; I believe we made our vows to one another the first night we met. The night you held my hand and led me through crowds of drunken people. The night we shouted our histories to one another in the corners of various bars. The night I noticed the half-moon line at the edge of your smile and thought, against my will, “I’m going to be watching that deepen for the rest of my days.”

On this day, so many thousands of days ago, we told one another in our wedding vows that our hearts had found their home.

It is true. I realize I’ve been a renovation project. If a real estate agent were attempting to sell me to you, it would go something like this: deep flaws in surface, but structure is probably solid.

And you would say, without hesitation, “There is nothing flawed.”

You’ve taught me so much about stepping outside of my own emotional and spiritual language. When I pass over to the other side, I’m sure the angels and God and all the in-between variations and translators will say, “Alegra, you won the lottery.”

And all I will be able to say in response is, “Yeah, I know. And I did my best. Did I totally f*ck it up? I didn’t want to…I wanted to be so much more than I am.”

You know this, Marido-Raniera-Babe-Big Oaf-Man Who Snores Like A God, but it is my daily hope that all of those deities and spiritual janitors will wipe the anxiety from my brow and say, “Your husband, your children, they understood love. You did good. You did as best as you could.”

It is my hope that you understand how much I love you. Every moment of every day.
My heart found it’s home in yours. And when it did, it began unpacking itself.

It stood before you, surrounded by clutter, and in bad lighting and said, “Do you still love me?”

And you said yes.

Day after day, you gather me in your arms, you whisper, “Yes, you deserve to be here.”

And for this, I owe you everything.

It would be my greatest success to spend the rest of my life with you, to grow old by your side, having you remember the beauty of me, and the ignorance. To recognize the wisdom that passes through me, despite myself, and to love me most for everything that happens in between.

“You’ve been crying, haven’t you?” my mom asks me over skype. The question just makes me start crying all over again.

I begin from the beginning.
After a full weekend, I began the week on empty and then Joaquin refused to nap. But the baby ducks, they were so sweet, and I would go sit with them in the bathroom, talking to them, holding them, trying to surround them with calm. And so did Sol. He spent as many moments as he could, holding his duck as if it were a wish, fragile, ready to burst, his responsibility to nurture into being. He’d ask me to go sit in the bathroom with him, so we could help the ducks adjust to their new family together. And I would. I’d go sit with him. I’d watch my firstborn tenderly stroking his duck, pulling his hands away proudly to show me how the duck was calm, relaxed in his lap. “It’s almost accepted me as its Daddy,” he’d say.

Last night, Sol’s anxiety was a tiny snake striking at our bedtime prayers. The schedule had changed. The next day, I would be picking him up instead of Daddy. No matter how I tried to reassure him, the transition was an abyss and he wanted nothing to do with attempting to navigate a bridge suspended over it.

Exhausted, I said, “How about you just stay home and help me with Joaquin? So long as you and Zaviera promise to help and let me rest, because I’m very tired.”

So, our plans were made. Sol would stay home and he was excited about this because it would give him all day to spend with his duck. I sent him into dreams with an endless loop of   Brahms lullaby. I imagined my vocal chords being carved away by eight years of humming this lullaby, shaped like water shapes stone as it passes over it endlessly.
I slipped away from Sol when I felt his body exhale, that moment when the tension leaves and he is away, somewhere else.
I was worried about the ducks. I didn’t know why, but I was. So I gathered them to my chest, their long necks wrapping around mine, their webbed feet scratching my chest as they scurried up into my hair, and I clucked to them, waiting for one of them to shit on me, just so I could make a joke about it, but they didn’t. They nuzzled into my hair, their hearts stopped pounding so fiercely, and I held them to me, imagining a wildly maternal and crazy thought of spending the night in the bathroom, so they’d have another warm body near them, so they’d know they had a new flock.

But I didn’t. I didn’t think Dan would be too pleased to find me curled up next to the bath tub. I could imagine him sighing, “After three children, I’ve almost got my wife back and now I have to compete with some ducks? Really?”

Instead of a night on the bathroom floor, I curled up next to my husband, our third and final child throwing his arms around my neck, sighing, and I fell asleep to dream of sharks, cows that acted like dogs, and steep trails with treacherous drop-offs, I woke up to not enough oxygen in my muscles, duck-scratches on my neck, and three children with plans for the day.

I say to my parents, wiping at my eyes that are swelling up and already too-stingy, “So yeah, we drove to the plant store and bought an avocado tree for Joaquin’s birthday, and some cabbage and broccoli, and Sol was asking me about the lifespan of a duck and he was so excited to get home, he had plans to spend the rest of the afternoon sitting with his duck and getting to know it.”

And then we got home. I sat down at the computer, needing to feel the edges of my body return, and Sol came running down the hall, tears in his eyes, “Mommy, something is wrong with my duck! It can’t stand up properly.”

I’m up and following him, hoping that this is just a moment of confusion, but knowing, somehow, it isn’t. When I see the duck, I know.

I pick it up and set it down, watching it collapse, it’s head thumping into the towels. I gather it to my chest and sit on the hardwood floor.

Sol looks at me, his eyes…how do you describe something like this? You can’t. Or, I can’t. I can’t describe what it was like when he said to me, “She’s dying, isn’t she? Can I pray? Can I do something to make her better?”

And all I can do is let him see into my eyes, to see them in the same way that I saw his, and say, “No, sweetheart, all we can do is hold her.”

He did. He held her for almost an hour while she slowly died. He cried and I cried.

I’ve never been in such awe of him.

When the last of her life had left, he placed her in my lap and began gathering materials for her burial.
There are so many more details, so many things he said, but honestly, writing this has wrung me out. There are funny things, profound things, in-between things, all I want to really record is this:

I am in awe of my children

I am in awe of you, Sol-Raniera Noel Clarke

you are an amazing spirit

thank you for choosing me as your mother

This is the story I attempted to tell my parents as I stared them down through my laptop: missing them, their presence, their scent, their everything.

I am not sure you can ever tell these stories. It’s more like throwing out handfuls of words, trusting that life will find its home and begin again.

Sol is right. That duck was special. And I’m sure that right now, somewhere on the other side of this life, it is wagging its little tail, watching over us, and shitting all kinds of great manure to grow our heavenly garden.

Bless you wee little creature. I loved you. I did.

Sol is a tangle of arms and legs beneath layers of blankets.

“I don’t understand why I feel this way,” he says to me. “I don’t understand why I have this feeling in my body about school. I always worry that I won’t be able to find you and daddy again.”

I climb on to the bed and immediately there are two bodies rolling toward me, searching to claim territory.

Zaviera’s fingers press into my arm, flutter down my cheek, her whisper-breath warm in my ear, “Mommy, I have things that worry me…”

Sol’s voice goes up a few notches in volume – his way of competing with the way Zaviera can blend into me.

“I don’t understand why the weekends have to be so short. Two days isn’t anything.”

I untangle hands and feet against protests and rearrange them so that I can stretch my body out.

“I don’t think what you’re feeling is so strange,” I say to Sol. “I just think that you feel things in a bigger way than most people – kind of like a super power. I think it’s normal to feel afraid when you are away from your family.”

“You mean that most kids don’t have feelings about losing their parents or getting lost, instead they might have a little feeling of fear and then think, ‘oh, I really want to play soccer or basketball’ and then they forget about everything else.”  His hands are up in the air, measuring feelings in the shadows of the bedroom. Zaviera is restless next to me, conjuring her own stories to stomp out Sol’s.

“Yes, people feel things differently. You feel things in a really big way and that is something special about you. You feel it in your body in a way that is very loud. It’s called being sensitive and it’s gift.”

Sol has two smiles; one that makes me want to look away because of the effort it takes, and one that I want to turn my face toward but don’t have to because I can feel it.  It is like the sun. Warm. Pervasive and powerful.

We talk for another stretch of time, my children using topics like ladder rungs to climb up over one another, and then I say, “Okay, it’s time.”

Zaviera volunteers to pray and Sol whispers, “Will you hold me, Mommy?”

As he asks, he is already reaching for my arm and pulling it over his thin body. His head is finding its place on my chest.

“God, I just want to thank you for this lovely day,” my daughter echoes the cadence of the prayers I speak over them, night after night, and I find my spine softening into the mattress, my lungs expanding. “I want to pray that you give our family good thoughts in our mind while we sleep. I pray you put happy thoughts into Sol’s mind and take away all of his scary thoughts. Let us wake up happy. Amen.”

I think of Dan and Joaquin out in the lounge and how when the first two are asleep, I will find my husband and youngest asleep.

I will wake up my husband and say, “Everything is going to be okay. More than okay.”