Hi, hey, a note: Thank you for your thoughts on my last post! Haven’t decided for or against the newsletter yet, so for now, we’ll just carry on with some occasional fiction here, and who knows what else, and we’ll see where life takes us…

She feels deflated—and tired of talking—when she walks into the coffee shop on Wednesday morning. The argument last night with her mother sticks to her, and she can’t shake the off-kilter feeling. She and her mother never fight; in their household, it’s her dad whose hot temper sparks the arguments. She and her siblings were always arguing with him in a comfortable, this-is-how-we-love sort of way: One minute they were shouting and slamming doors, and then by dinner time everyone was completely fine. Fights with her dad pass like a quick thunderstorm, the tension dissolving into nothingness, the chaos necessary to clear the air—just like weather.

She’s been running early in the morning—before 7 AM—now that every day dawns with an oppressive blanket of humidity and heat. It’s as if the months of the summer were tentative until now, July feeling too timid to really open ‘er up, then August arrived and put its foot down, turning up the wattage and sizzling away the drizzly, cloudy weather, like a burner on high under a pan of liquid.

Even starting early doesn’t help on some days. It’s so hot that she wilts the second she steps outside to lace up her running shoes. She has no energy—and every step is like pulling her legs through something sticky and tar-like. But she does it anyway. She finishes, her shirt drenched in sweat. She slips into the cool water off the dock by the marina, hanging onto the ladder to check for jellyfish. She scans the horizon for the dot of a fin or a flicker of motion—two weeks ago her neighbors saw two dolphins flitting around the boats moored just offshore.