It’s early morning. I dream of a city from which spaceships are about to lift off at any moment. I’m in the crowd when it hits me: I don’t know how to write something like that. Not yet. I begin to work out how I would build it. Then I wake up and remember my manuscript, where there are no spaceships. And if I finish it with my sanity intact, there won’t be any.

I remember I’ll barely touch it this week.

A single good kitchen scene would do. I’m good at those. I know cooking, routine, sadness, flavors and cravings. I’m somewhere between rabbit and spaetzle when my phone cuts through the room. It’s Sasha from the construction site. He explains something I don’t understand at all. I let him think I do.

I hang up, sit down at my desk, and try to continue. Nothing. I pivot to another task, hoping momentum will carry over. It doesn’t. Today even basic arithmetic feels hostile. And getting the software to cooperate feels more complicated than the space program in my dream.

My mind escalates quickly. I run the list. Hypersensitivity. Perimenopause. Amyloid plaques. I imagine convergence.

With sugar and caffeine, I push through most of what’s required. Even the old Cindy-and-Claudia sequence rises from muscle memory, carried forward from VHS tapes and another version of me.

Still, the endorphins don’t settle it.

“You’re not trying hard enough,” my father’s voice says.

I don’t argue. I remember the next line even better: “Explaining yourself is a sign of weakness.”

I sit by my plants on the windowsill and look out for ten minutes. A purple hyacinth. A cyclamen orchid. And something I never remember the name of, so I call it the frog.

I run my finger along the frog’s smallest shoot.

It is pushing upward.

It has no idea whether it will make it.