Pick up your coffee and grab your book, reserving a pinky to hook the handle of your water tumbler. Step outside. Remember to invite the dog before closing the door behind you. Or, better yet, leave it open! Let the stiff air escape along with the lingering pet dander and cooking odors. Emerging into the open air of the backyard, you may not immediately pick up any fragrance of note, but take a moment to breathe it in. Take notice of the crispness, the contrast between air that flows and air that’s stagnant. Your nose has never been particularly keen, so give less attention to the idea of scent. Focus instead on the raw aspects. There’s an earthiness in the air that you can almost taste and a tang of salt from the nearby ocean. Invite in the refreshing breeze as if it …

Being the Thanksgiving holiday, people were off work, mostly, mostly with their families. Being an important week for consumerism too, I worked odd hours—I was up at 6:00 am for the go-ahead to send digital traffic in APAC, on again at 6:00 pm for EMEA, and again at 1:00 am for AMR, when calamity struck in Chile and we were kept on until 7:00 am. I indulged in a lengthy snooze that day, staying in bed until well into the afternoon. Reveling in the luxury of an extended Friday slumber was delightful, yet just as easy as I disrupted my routine, it felt I’d upended the rhythm of my world. My mind was fragile, seemed on edge, like the littlest thing could push it into a flip. This was in no small part because, in between the EMEA greenlight and the calamity, I …

For the better part of an hour, a French, Muslim, Moroccan man had been massaging my head with surprising coordination and persistence. His fingers were strong, but the kneading mostly gentle, juxtaposing the pair of power and finesse gave me a deep sense of reassurance. He made good use of my hair too, occasionally running his fingers through it, occasionally squeezing it tightly into his fist. Finally, and unexpectedly, he advanced from my head to my back.

April woke abruptly to the sound of marvelous drums and horns, their school’s percussion-inflected fight song overwhelming the walls and screaming into her room from underneath the crack in the door. The room still mournfully dark after she lifted her sleep mask, her displeased cat tangling his claws in her hair. The pull of the darkness was bone-deep, but just before she could fall back into the seductive warmth of her covers there came the drumming from her roommate’s palms against her thin particleboard door and then the sharp light from the living room and, finally, the heft of both of them belly-flopping atop her diaphragm.

The hydraulic arms of a garbage truck heave and press in slow undulation, lifting a dumpster and slamming it to the ground. My neighbors a building over are having a conversation in Tagalog, speaking with great joy and laughter just beyond my bedroom window. The truck reverses and beeps, pistons inside of pneumatic air cylinders compress, a la rap video Chevy Impala lowrider, hoisting and dropping another dumpster. It rattles off the pavement and my neighbors speak louder. The morning is cool and dim and Cohen rises with a rigid tightness. Sinking into a deep stretch, he leans back with a commendable hold to hit the front legs. Then it's forward, face pushed out, for the back legs...finishing with a full extension of the spine, a foot off the ground, and a nice tremble for good measure. “Oh, good stretch, good stretch,” I …