Lately, she’d been having trouble figuring out how she’d like to sit in chairs. Someone at yoga class inquired whether eating your baby’s placenta is vegan and she lost her train of thought for an entire 23 minutes. 2023 was the year when nothing and everything began to make sense. 

She had dinner plans with her mother that night, a particularly unfortunate night for the occasion, as the raccoons just kept getting rounder. The raccoons, in love with her cats. She realized this is how it would be now: lots of opinions, with most of which she did not agree. 

She’d talk to him in her stomach. He rarely replied, but when he did, he spoke in parables: “The fish that tries to fly will only end up back in the sea.” It didn’t feel all that inspirational, but then again, neither did the text message she received that morning. Neither did most things other than his alien arms floating around in a pulsing amniotic heartbeat sac of dark nights, deep house Berlin. 

Sometimes, she’d think she understood what it all meant, only to have one of her cats jump onto the kitchen counter. They were not very good at unloading and reloading the dishwasher, the cats. But she was good at judging the political views of others. For instance, she understood that the mailman never closed the front gate because he hated her. She understood that the grease wouldn’t come off the pan because it wanted to be left alone (dear god, would someone please just leave her alone). 

It was the day he put a frozen meal into the dishwasher and blamed it on the pregnancy. The same day she lowered the ethical standards for television in their home by about 70 percent. And in the end, she cried and cried because she wanted everything to be tie-dye, goddammit. That would be when things would start making sense. She’d previously lied when she said she understood anything, anything at all.