Felix kept a list of all the foods he wanted to try in his cell phone notes. He knew the names of the bakers and the owners of the bakery, was part of an experimental seeds exchange where he was trying to grow mythical-sounding blue beans, he chatted with Rose, the cashier at their closest Trader Joe’s, about her terrible son-in-law, whom he had never met but whose off-the-grid misdeeds he knew all of and judged severely while buying his blue chips and chocolate-covered snacks, and was spending the summer learning how to skateboard because he had always wanted to be able to grind down a staircase’s handrail and why not now. Felix genuinely wanted to see Ayanna grow old; he wasn’t just being nice! Everything about life, even when it was explaining to an ER doctor that he was a grown man learning how to skateboard and that was why he had to get X-rays, made a part of his brain say “more, more, more.” Ayanna saw that in his eyes instead of the embarrassment she would have felt. Meanwhile, Ayanna couldn’t even look at pictures of rescue dogs because she knew her poor, dumb heart could not bear to love something that was certain to die before her. She knew for a fact there were children out in the world who were more sophisticated about death, grief, and love than she was. Beyond that, Ayanna often had to remind herself that anytime a person indulged in the process of emotional mathematics, jumping into ratios and equations to calculate someone else’s sadness or lack thereof, it was only going to result in finding their own unhappiness.

It was lucky Ayanna hadn’t paid for Wi-Fi on the plane. This high, this melancholy, she could see herself being tempted to drop in the group chat: Teach me how to be sustainably happy. Tell me how to live!! A bomb to drop among all the back-and-forths about the trip they were going to take before Jane had her first baby. When the flight was done, she bought an Auntie Anne’s pretzel, told a spirit to reconsider spending eternity in an airport, and finally got a rideshare to pick her up. Everything will be fine, she told herself for, at least, the one thousandth time.