How are you? She asked.
Mostly really good. Really good. Some days really bad. Mostly good, though. And you?

We sat at the cafe in a bookstore. The rain trying to turn to snow outside.  A heady, full nose of fresh ground beans and cinnamon and vanilla inside. A very perfect place to be.  A very perfect place to wander through after arriving intentionally early. A very perfect place for a small and quiet, hardly noticed panic attack as the mind reminded the body that it was a year almost to the day that he said he was leaving.  But that was so many nights and days and moments and lessons ago...that was long before I learned how to stop that faucet by the garage from leaking...long before I learned how to seal cracks in a driveway and how to use a wrench and how to sleep alone in a California King-sized bed. Before I remembered how to cook for one.  And before I finally stopped shaving my legs.
She had been through worse, with a very public incident not involving her, but splashing her with its mud all the same.  She had fled to the other side of the world.  And was back now, still wounded but finding strength from us.  She is too good to let sit shackled to the past.  She still wonders how, why, WHY.  I tell her to step up and over and out.
It was a good day to clasp hearts with an ever-growing circle. It was a good day to take deep breaths in the cooking section, knowing my table will be filled, once again.  Some day.

My puppy sleeps with one paw against my leg, as if to keep track of me.  It would not be possible, some days, without him.