What’s a Tuesday?

It’s only Tuesday, or,
it’s Tuesday already!

I am forgetting there is life past this neighborhood. When the kids who were waiting in line for the swings told me they’d just returned from Germany, I was like, Germany? What’s Germany? What’s a chair? Where is 23rd street, even? What’s a swing?

I remember so much when I try. Today, while I sat in the park in the rain and watched the place clear out, all of the screaming boy demons running like a collective fireball up and away I thought, this is it, let’s dig around in storage a bit. I thought of the pool. The quiet of being able to exit a house unfettered. The dispersal of my childrens’ anger, the lack of it directed toward me, the cornfields. I thought of a camping trip, less than two months ago, that made me feel like I could keep going and I remember thinking then, this memory is to keep for later. I feel a tightness in the center of my chest. As the kids outside walk home from school today, as the cases in the city tick upwards, as my partner goes to work at a restaurant, as the demons on the playground spitscream at one another, maskless and wild. I’m so very done with it all.

My poor friends. Getting texts that say “I’m so very done with it all.” I know it’s a bit of a wallowy way to be, but I do feel in it in a new way. A durational way. Now, more than ever, in it.

The park was quiet on the baby side where we were and I watched a squirrel bury a peanut in the crack of the playground turf. The girls climbed a concrete elephant over and over.

I have memories stockpiled. It’s only Tuesday, I want to write here, but I shouldn’t tie things up like that so often. I should leave it undone.