I didn’t eat enough lunch today, or else I ate it at the wrong time, and now I am jittery and inconsolable about nothing. Today Dave and I drove to Phoenix, so I could drop Dave off to stay with his brother for a week, and then I came home to check the mail because it seemed like we might have a mail thief, but now it seems like we don’t. When we left this morning, Paul was mad at us, and so he lay as flat as he could on the floor, and now I’m jittery and hungry and I miss Dave, and I wonder if lying as flat as I could would help me nearly so much as it helps a dog.

We all find a sense of control in funny places.

In monsoon season, we wait for rain to fall on the desert sands, in the hottest part of the year, in a very hot part of the country. All over, the country is hot-tin-roof-hot, and here it is also baking-cookies-on-your-car-dashboard hot. My hair looks great in the morning, but quickly loses volume. This, too, feels applicable to my incorrect afternoon hunger. Though it is in fact the result of humidity, if you want a more scientific precision.

The clouds are cumulonimbus magnificent, huge on the mountains, huge on the horizon; is it just the time of year to feel we are always on the horizon of something, always waiting for something that may or may not happen? Is this astrological? Is this the terrestrial form of our god-selves, coming to taunt our earthly bodies? Is it gonna rain today? Is it gonna rain tomorrow?

It’s time for cherries in the backyard, cherries in a bowl. Time for the mailbox to be an imprecise locus of arrival and departure; time for the notifications to be early and incorrect in most everything.

Tomorrow I will not drink a Diet Coke, starting at ten-twenty and ending at one-forty-five. I will not drive the car four hours round trip, or four plus and lunch on Chex Mix, original recipe. I will eat on a schedule, and be ready for anything, or so I tell myself, as if I could predict the rising and falling strength of my body, the rising and falling strength of anything, the way that rising and falling pressure is picking us all up and dropping us down, daily, to lie on the floor as flat as we go.

There is a fifteen-to-thirty percent chance it will rain before midnight; a fifteen-to-thirty percent chance of isolated thunderstorms, a fifteen-to-thirty percent chance of something raining down on our heads. I promise to eat better tomorrow, after a good night’s sleep. Good day, good night.