I flip backward through the notebook, searching for something, anything, to explain why my throat closes around a sob that I choke down. There are lines and lines of observations and information, exhaustive in detail about what I’ve done and who I’ve interacted with. I notice a few lines here and there blacked out with a thick marker, like they’ve been redacted. Odd. I move on. Likely it was extraneous information I removed so that it wouldn’t distract me from what’s important.

Reading my notes, I see that yesterday I hiked the Portage Pass Trail with Sefina, and we had good weather and even startled a bear when we reached the top. Sefina hid behind me until he was gone. That part makes me smile. Sefina is a good friend from before and a self-proclaimed wimp when it comes to wildlife. But spending time with her wouldn’t make me feel this way, so it’s not what I’m looking for. Moving on I see that yesterday was also a Wednesday, when I wash my laundry, which I like to do in the late afternoon when the kids in the building get out of school. The laundry is just down from the lobby, where the kids like to hang out, and I can listen to their talking, laughing, and goofing off while I fold warm shirts and match wool socks. I was a teacher briefly before, well, everything, and I still like to be around kids, even if I can’t ever teach again and was a teacher for only—oh, there it is. Just under laundry but before make dinner. One line that gives me a pang and explains the heaviness that settles across my shoulders.

I wish I could teach again.

A thought, a wish, a yearning I had and then recorded last night before it slipped away. It’s true. I do miss teaching. And the feeling that made me want it, the sadness, is what remains of that thought. There is a certain kind of relief that comes with understanding, and I breathe out, rewrite the idea along with a summary of my thoughts from today.

Satisfied, I move on to the rest of my tasks, see a line I’ve doodled in the margins, next to the To Do list in my notebook. Bear that broke into building. I chew the end of my pen, my thoughts drifting to the parts of my past that I do remember. From before.

Like how Dad had wanted me to leave Whittier as soon as I finished high school. Worried that if I didn’t escape our remote town, which had more inches of snow and rain than people, then I would never get out, that in time I would grow to hate it just like my mother. Said he felt it in his bones. And it was the same feeling he’d had just before my mother walked out on us.