I hope you are safe and well, and stateside.

I’ve gone back to work, albeit only one day a week with clients, one when the shop is closed. I went for a test at the drive-through location in New Rochelle. Everyone there, the State Troopers, the Army, the healthcare workers, everyone was so calming. One of the army guys, the name on his jacket said Lorenzo, he called me beautiful. He saw how nervous I was and he called me beautiful.

I’m waiting for results, no symptoms but I’m in a public-facing position. I was sicker than I ever have been in my life back in January but no way of knowing if that was it.

I’ve gone back up to the pottery after a 5 months hiatus. I’ve wanted to go back, needed to go back. I’m making new work with nowhere to sell it but online. It isn’t really the selling that the making is about, though.

I called my father.
I haven’t spoken to him in a brutally long time. i know that he did not recognize my voice. but i told him that i loved him and he told me that he loved me too. i’m going to call him again this saturday.

I’ve been writing more, leaning into how cleanly I want to live my life, how little extra baggage I really want to carry with me. Channeling and focusing the rage that has been, in my past, such an incredibly destructive force with little to no benefit into something that I can use as both a tool and a weapon. It’s been this side of exhilarating, and I want to keep it that way. It isn’t something I want to revel in feeling but to be glad to be done with.

My second husband used to get off on watching my fury rage on unfettered. He loved how sharp I was, how precise. How everything I said was undeniably true.

That is until the day it finally turned on him in earnest. The day in couples’ therapy when the doctor asked me how I was feeling after watching me sit and seethe for 20 minutes, when he asked me how I was feeling and I turned to my husband and answered,

“I’m feeling like every time you fall asleep before I do how much I’d like to slit your fucking throat.”

I can tell you he didn’t like it very much then.

I’m not going to send this to you, am I.
No.

I have no way of knowing if you are alive.
I wish I did.