My strategies are slipping through my tired hands and it isn’t even 11am. I didn’t make it to morning Dog World, because I am buried so deeply inside the weight and darkness that my responses are in slow mo. A simple hello leaves me flailing like a fish on a hook, just trying to make a simple hello back. Where does my voice go? It’s the weirdest feeling, having to drag the syllables up from so far underground, that by the time they make it, the moment has long gone.

So, we went to the cemetery instead, where I don’t have conversations, or even fragments. More nods and mumbles in passing. It’s a different kind of Dog World with the dead and the trees.

If by chance I passed by Mr. Cohen on my heavy, footed circles round the graves, he would doff his hat and I would make the smallest inclination of my tired head. It’s one of those days. It often is.

I can’t go on but I do. And sometimes there is a lot of space around this paradox of my life… now is not such a time. Now. Right now, my lungs are too tired to try, and there is no space around the paradox of keeping going.

And I go on.