In response  

“What are here to do, but help each other and get through?”
~ Mark Horstman

Who’s life in midstream isn’t informed by the solutions of the shipwreck?
I fell asleep in my clothes last night. I work 2nd shift at a fucking bank. My church held a meeting the night before to decide if we were woman enough to let homeless drifters into our building, mortgaged to a bank, in the midst of a global pandemic, in a nation at war with its mind.

I’ve got 20 bucks to my name until payday and maxed out credit cards, a mom that worries, an ex that flumes. I realized just this year that if I didn’t stop drinking I would die, and die alone. And those are just the more obvious defects. I am no knight in armor. I seek no rose.

And yet… .
I am drinking Ethiopian coffee and eating Chilean oranges on a sunny day in November surrounded by the gentle mountains I love. We communicate with satellites and pocket computers. I read your text this morning and drafted this note with a Japanese fountain pen. My Japanese car, full of Arabian gas, sits on my quiet street yards from my unlocked door.
I am sitting on a leather couch in a heated house surrounded by electric light thinking of you, so terribly beautiful.

So I’ll take life as it comes, so terribly and grandly beautiful. Life is good. It is worth dipping naked and open-hearted into the freezing water.
I play it as it lies.