The First Ordinary Day.

Two words this time, not four, but they carried a different kind of weight — less instructive, more like she was simply marking the occasion the way you’d mark a date on a calendar, making sure it existed somewhere outside just my own head.

The Shape of Quiet.

Coffee comes before words, always. This is not a rule I decided on consciously so much as a rule that decided itself, the way certain habits do when you repeat them enough times that they stop being habits and become simply what a day is made of.