The Brief Attempt of the Author to be a Mourning Dove

And how life improves without us

This email is a a combined February January paid newsletter, as the two stories were deeply intertwined; I could not pry them apart. And as such it so big a newsletter that it may not fit all in your inbox, so I encourage you to read on the app or to click the banner. If you’re not sure you’ve reached the end just know we always end here with a love always.

The difficult thing was that it was bad, and I didn't know it. Not until passing a convenience store, standing outside the glass walls with its glowing artificial interior, looking in over the menu. And there were friends with me, walking the route I took home after work so often a trench of my loneliness had formed of that long odious routine passing bars with the monotonous understanding I would not ever have a weekend inside them the way I did when I was younger, and that the store was new and I wanted to try it.

Why did I notice? It was warmer than usual, the kind that, despite being expected, surprises you. We hadn’t buttoned our coats, but we’d brought coats. It was the time of year when you’re beginning to feel brave enough to anticipate beauty, when the atmosphere is ambiguous only insofar as you know it from someplace good and agreeable, somewhere beginning, but which beginning depends on the day, depends on where that long lost wind is coming from. And because I’d been given a Saturday and Friday off without asking, which was what we’d been talking about when I’d stopped to look in at the store.

I feel a sense of duty now to say the things I know. I know that for anything to get better, I have to do my part. I have to rise tired but early, sit on my couch, and give myself time. I have to go to therapy and decide that the reason I’d gone was what I would talk about rather than the things that happened the week previous, which are, yes, troublesome but nothing in the end. I have to do things maybe I don’t want to do, like rest when I want to work or the opposite. I have to make good food again and pack up the leftovers later for lunch.

But there are moments in the time just before Daylight Savings begins.