Outside it’s the same bad luck, every two or three seconds a catastrophe happens to someone, goes unnoticed by someone else. When the helicopters flew over and the sirens started, I had no idea my neighbor’s house had caught fire. I went on weeding, another uneventful afternoon.

We walked by the house later, saw the caution tape and everything inside charred. Holes where windows had been. A black film over yellow wallpaper. Firefighters moving slowly between the house and the fire engine.

It would be dishonest of me to tell you I didn’t think of myself, and feel lucky.

::

Weeds in the backyard have doubled in length. Their roots hold the soil, misshapen pale hands. I drive in the shovel, remove each weed in its entirety, not so they won’t grow back but so I can see the delicate roots, how they taper then fray like old gauze. Nothing should be so white and vulnerable.

::

It’s like the feeling of being on a carnival ride, but in my feet, she tells me. She presses the toes of her right foot into the arch of her left foot, hard. This relieves the feeling to some extent, she says. She sits this way for some time. It also helps to lie on my stomach and hang my feet off the bed.

The moon slid behind and below a small, not-quite-clean break in the clouds, turning the sky into a hyperflourescent tumor.

When I say a not-quite-clean break, think of cotton balls when you begin to pull them apart. They become much thinner in the middle but remain gauzily connected. It was that kind of cloudbreak.

The moon backlit every vascular strand of dirt, every water-molecule wisp. These rivulets and smoke-plumes went bright and dark at once — brighter than the surrounding sky, darker than the moon.

I watched the moon move up into this veined and tangled opening: Another moon-birth — through dark matter, through an unmistakable but inexcisable lesion.

My husband and I just got back from an afternoon in the park.

We watched leaves lift from branches, float for a while, then make their soft landings. We watched sunlight penetrate the leaves remaining on each tree with such intensity the leaves appeared to be internally illuminated: countless strands of lime-green holiday lights all switched on at once.

A crow landed on a branch above us, paid careful attention to its surroundings — whatever it is crows pay attention to. (I wouldn’t presume to know.)

My husband’s face was the largest thing in my field of vision, lying next to him as I was. I realized he’s the one person in this world I have any real chance of knowing.

He gave me a kiss. We slept. Whatever happened while we slept will always be a mystery to us, although I am certain the crow was still there, and the leaves — as well as the wind that stirred them.

The sun falls over everything indiscriminately, like a drunk whore at a party.

What lies beyond the immediacy of my home feels like a world away. I look through my window at houses, trees and the sky that gives houses and trees depth.

What I see is a little stage set against a blue, perfectly ironed curtain. This is no world, I think. Only a simulacrum: solid enough to hold onto, tough enough to break me and strong enough to support me when I need it.

My only requirement for entry is to close my eyes, click my heels three times and believe in this place. Then I will be able to put one foot in front of the other, latch my front door behind me and make my way along golden streets.

Today on my way home from work, I made a turn near my house and came around the corner to crows, crows, everywhere crows. The sky so thick with them, it was almost black. They moved through the air like a single dark aggravation. I say aggravation because the ones that were flying clearly wanted to land, but there were no more surfaces to land on, every power line and street lamp clustered with them, every tree branch shaking with their weight and motion.

They were cawing so loudly I could hear it inside my car — the flying ones as if to say to the perched ones, Move on. You’ve sat there long enough. Let me have a rest, too. The perched ones as if to say to the flying ones, Find your own damn spot. I shit on this one already, which means it’s all mine.

Soon enough, I was past all the commotion and back under the stone-gray Seattle sky. Now, I find myself wondering what the crows are doing. I imagine them all settled in for the night, turning green, then yellow, then red with the methodic change of traffic lights.

We’re having another winter storm in Seattle. All day, I’ve watched the wind manhandle the trees in my neighborhood. Our power has flickered repeatedly, as if it’s flirting with the notion of going out entirely. Now hail is clinking (make that clanking, since the hail is getting larger) against our home’s gutters and windows. I just moved my car to the bottom of our hill, which means I should at least have a shot at making it to the GRE testing center tomorrow morning, when the weather is supposed to be even worse than it is now.

When I got out of my car after safely nestling it on a side street at the foot of the hill, I noticed a familiar sound. At first, I thought it was cicadas, but there aren’t any cicadas here. Even if there were, they wouldn’t be out this time of year. Still, the momentary misimpression of hearing them stirred something in me — a longing for the Midwest, for late-night walks down quaint, flat streets, the bark of the oaks and elms and maples and magnolias covered with them. The surround-sound of them above us, beside us, near and far. Every morning, the rattling was gone. Then at dusk, they’d start up with their modulated drone, vibrating their tymbals and turning their bodies into diminutive chambers of sound.

But I digress. The sound, as I was saying, wasn’t cicadas. It was the hail. I’m not sure how hail created that kind of din, but it did. While I walked back up the hill to my house, shielded from the hail by my umbrella, I felt happy as I thought about the joy of plucking abandoned cicada exoskeletons from branches and tree trunks, something I relished as a child in Oklahoma and as an adult in Kansas City. (Aaah, the wonder of their split-open backs, banded abdomens and finely haired bodies. Their alien eyes. Their hunched posture. Their clawed and crooked front arms. And oooh, how lithe they must be to crawl out of such a thin casing without destroying it. And wow, the thought of them rising up out of themselves — soft-bodied with pale-gold wings and red eyes and black bands on top of their heads — and wafting on the breeze like miniature German flags.)

But I also felt sad about moving so far away from them, both in terms of distance and, increasingly, time. As more time passes, I will forget about cicadas (and all the other details of my old Midwestern life), recalling them less often and with less specificity than I do now. One day, I will hear hail that sounds just like those ugly little racket-makers, and I won’t even make the connection.

But that’s what we do, right? Move forward. It’s the only choice we have.

So, with every step I took toward what is now my home, I exhaled. The tiny droplets of water and ice I breathed out into the cold night hung under the arc of my umbrella until I stepped forward, leaving even my last breath behind.

* * *
Note

I lied. I am posting this one thing before the exam.

Tonight, the kinnikinnick leaves in the median, wet with rain, were a thousand green mirrors reflecting the golden glow of streetlights.

Still, I wished for long, hot days and clear skies. I wanted to see the kinnikinnick dry and brown as a cigar, unable to take the heat. I needed the sun to slip through my windshield, without asking, and use my skin as a resting place.

I want to tell you about the moon, shining behind a single cloud. I want to say that the cloud is like tissue under magnification. If I wanted to be more specific, I would say it’s like my husband’s brain reproduced in sliced images after technicians injected him with contrast and slid him into the MRI machine’s lonely tube. I want you to know about the cloud’s highs and lows, its irregular shape that almost looks like folds. And about the moon, which makes the cloud’s edges bright — just like contrast makes any human brain appear to have a light source. In the cloud’s center, the moon shines through, round and white, lighting the night sky like a tumor.

* * *
Note

I really did see a cloud like this on my way home from work tonight. I wrote this piece before realizing that seven years ago this month is when LoveShack was diagnosed with a hemangioblastoma in his posterior fossa (a brain tumor, that is).

Why I feel as if I’ve known some people before. Why my husband writes like my first boyfriend speaks. Static electricity, magnetism and other attractive processes. Sublimation and deposition. How much work skin does. Why some things smell and others don’t. How want can bully need. Why frogs can’t see dead flies. Rhetorical questions. Powder puffs. Onomatopoeia. Why most hummingbirds can neither walk nor hop. The dream where I hover above myself in bed. Breathlessness. What sunsets want from us. How a merry-go-round unwinds the sky.

Last night I watched it grow dark as rain broke yellow leaves from their trees. Raindrops drove the leaves to the ground much faster than they would have fallen otherwise. It was unsettling to watch them drop so quickly. When I’d half notice one out of my peripheral vision, I would think it was something heavier falling, something with real weight, perhaps a bird. Not that birds weigh that much, but they do weigh more than leaves and they would fall, I imagine, about as fast as these leaves were falling. Of course I knew birds weren’t dropping from the sky, but this faulty observation unhinged me slightly nonetheless.

It also troubled me to remain dry through all this rain. To sit in my house, protected from above and below, from the sides. To be separated from what the trees, the ground, the birds were experiencing. It’s not that I think rain — or, more specifically, being rained on — is healing. But it might have done me some good to have stepped outside yesterday and looked at the moon through a curtain of water.