The eye is healing, and I am grateful for that. The “bubble” is slowly dropping and my two eyes are working better together, but I still can’t read very well from a book or even on the computer unless I hold things right up close to my right eyeball. I’ve probably not read fiction now for the longest period in my life. No kidding. It’s been a weird few weeks. I’m depressed and trying to rest. I meditate daily and depend on the two Marias to help me with Sophie. Ave Marias. Carl’s been a dream, dropping in the eye drops four times a day and coaxing me out on walks. My sons sent me a box of chocolate covered strawberries today for Valentine’s Day and a note that made me cry. They are, seriously, perfect in many ways. Sophie is good. The world is weird. What the hell happened to us this year? What the hell happened today with those creeps in the Senate? So much sickness and loneliness and weirdness and so many creeps. All the nesses the messes the confesses. Covid absolutism. The other day I was crying a lot, off and on, so I went for a walk around the block at 9:00 pm. I walked in my neighborhood in the dark and I was slightly scared because I couldn’t really see given my bum eye and my glasses kept fogging up from the mask but I didn’t care. It felt weirder and weirder to be walking in my own neighborhood at night, alongside the homeless encampment outside of Ralph’s with my own catastrophic thoughts an accompaniment but I didn’t care about safety or even vision, to tell you the truth. I was just walking. My old friend Amanda M drove down from Santa Barbara on Friday with a pot of lentil soup, a loaf of bread and some cookies. I put the pot on the stove to heat it up, and then we walked through the house and out into my backyard where we sat and ate soup and bread and water and I made her laugh so hard that she spit out water and then a little later she made me do the same. My sadness lifted in that weird way that sadness lifts, and I felt almost giddy. I’m beginning to figure it out and I think it’s loneliness and loss and a lawsuit and money and betrayal, a lack of acknowledgement a lifetime motherhood patriarchy, weirdness the dumb call for unity, anger simmering the parsing of acceptance and resignation in caregiving. Create in the face of fuck as Lidia Y says. Right now the wind is tearing dry palm fronds from their slender stems and you can hear them crashing to the ground, husks curved like boats in my garden.

*My fantastic artist friend Susan Arena painted that fetching pirate picture above. Thank you, Susan. Check her out on Instagram or on her website. Here you go.