September called its first truce with the heat and then took it back. On a Tuesday, I ran into Dylan on the street outside a temp agency. It wasn’t a run‑in; it was a cross‑walk. He saw me and didn’t pretend he didn’t. I nodded. He nodded. We stood at our separate curbs and waited for the light.
When the signal changed, we passed each other in the middle. He didn’t say “Kayla” and I didn’t say “Dylan.” I noticed a new suit back home; I noticed a lunch pail. He noticed that I noticed and gave the smallest of shrugs like, I’m trying. I nodded back like, I can see that. The light switched. We kept moving.
Two blocks later, my phone buzzed with a text from a number labeled Christina—pantry: “He didn’t ask me to send this. But today he told a guy in line, ‘I don’t want to take more than I need. Someone else needs this bag of rice more.’ Thought you’d want to know he’s learning portions.” I typed thank you and then deleted it and didn’t reply. Some things need no audience but your own ribcage.
October is the month the Midwest pretends to be New England, then remembers it’s not—apologizing with sunsets so pink you feel rude looking away. I finished a grant proposal, baked a pie with Mina’s reckless amount of butter, and booked a ticket to Seattle to see the Pacific I’d only ever flown over. On the plane, I wrote another talk I might never give called “Soft is Not the Opposite of Strong.” It was mostly stories of women I knew who carried entire staircases alone and then taught themselves to ask someone else to grab the other end.
By Halloween, Hailey’s account had turned into a feed of platitudes over out‑of‑focus yoga poses. “Sometimes we lose everything to find ourselves,” she wrote under a photo of a candle. The comments were back on and ruthless. I scrolled two and stopped. I did not wish her ruin or redemption. I wished her quiet.
On Thanksgiving morning, I took a thermos to the river again. Last year had been sharp and bright and surgical. This year was dull and warm and precise. I listed the things I was grateful for in a notebook not because anyone asked but because gratitude is a hard skill. I wrote soup and girls with coins in their hair and the exact right wrench and my table and learning the difference between a couch and a crash pad and the way the dog at the shelter presses his forehead into my palm like it’s a switch for hope.