Toilet Paper and Ammo

Amid the Corona Virus pandemic, it is easy to say the world’s introverts are in their PRIME. Working from home, calling the dog a co-worker, and having the ultimate excuse to turn down plans? Boom. An introvert’s paradise. Sign me the hell up.

“How is everyone doing?” My boss asked the team over Skype one morning. It was about 3 weeks into quarantine, and I had long settled into my home office. My whiteboard wall was littered with notes and sketches for projects, my desk supported 3 laptops, I had the world’s largest cup of coffee in my hands, and I wasn’t wearing pants.

I was living my best life.

Let’s face it. Still living my best life. Right now.

Silence stretched across the call, and I had to check my connection to make sure I was still on.

“Um,” a team member spoke up. “I’m doing okay. It’s…weird.”

“Yes,” someone else agreed. “I’m really starting to miss people.”

“The social piece of things is certainly a challenge right now,” my boss affirmed.

Each team member took turns describing the challenges they were facing as they worked from home. It was clear everyone was yearning for a change in scenery and dying for some people time, and we were only three weeks in.

How fascinating.

“Kaitlin, how about you?” My boss asked me.

I fumbled to unmute myself, the delay in my response just long enough to be awkward.

I am always awkward. See post “This is Why I’m Not Allowed Outside.”

“I’m fine!” I sang out cheerfully.

Silence.

Apparently, I’m the odd one in the group.

I’m not sure if I do this to myself on purpose, or if I really have no control over myself in social situations. It probably would have been easier to agree with the group and commiserate, but I was completely in my element.

“I’m set up pretty well over here,” I continued. “I just need some faster internet and I could do this forever!”

They all chuckled uncomfortably, but it wasn’t a joke. To be clear, I certainly do not wish for an indefinite pandemic which keeps us trapped in our homes. I recognize this situation isn’t for everyone, and there are those seriously struggling with isolation. But personally, I would flourish working at home full-time. My home office is considerably less… peopley.

On several occasions, my husband and I have talked about how we would thrive in an apocalyptic situation. I don’t think we’re alone…by the way toilet paper and ammunition flew of the shelves last month, I’d say there’s an entire colony of people expecting the ‘rona to morph into the zombie apocalypse. (Toilet Paper? Really? If shit hits the fan, I think wiping your ass is going to be the least of your worries.) Millions of Americans are just waiting for the moment the victims of the Corona Virus rise from the grave so they can finally shout, “I TOLD YOU SO!”

Mike and I are by no means “preppers,” and we do not actually believe the zombie apocalypse is imminent, but we do think we’d be damn good at it. I can see us farming our property and hunting the deer that pass through. We would barrel through town in a massive truck to raid for supplies, use our Doberman Pinscher for security, and develop a deadly aim with our rifles and pistols. Basically, we’d be like characters straight out of The Walking Dead, except without the senseless drama and complete inability to have a moment of happiness.

As the zombies close in, we’d be standing in the center, back to back, unloading our mags in perfect rhythm, this fantastic husband and wife team taking on hell together.

“Oh my God,” I’d shout back at Mike. “I think you just shot Carl!”

“That zombie was Carl?!” Mike would exclaim, firing another round. “Eh…he was a douche bag, anyway.”

And the best part of the apocalypse?

No credit scores.

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Where Am I Going With This?

“Alright, Kait, where are you going with this?” I ask myself for the fourth time today. Adults usually have a plan. They’re normally organized. They know where they’re going.

The thing is, I don’t know where I’m going with this. I just start writing. It’s a lot like the piano for me, now. I took lessons for a dozen years. I was great. But then I went to college and the music wasn’t a priority anymore. It’s funny how we are somehow pushed to let go of the things that bring us joy when it’s time to become an adult. We don’t do it on purpose. We must learn to prioritize before we’re even ready, and sometimes things slide off the list. Take the piano for instance. Now, I can’t even play a fraction of what I used to. There are a couple songs I can still tickle out, but I can’t think about it. I can’t analyze it, because it’s not in my head. My brain has no idea how to play Fur Elise.

But my fingers remember.

If I don’t think about it

If I refuse to stop

I can still play Beethoven’s Fur Elise.

But the second I start to scrutinize the notes I’m hitting, the moment I focus too hard on the movement of my hands across black and white keys, I stumble. And I can’t start again.

Sometimes, writing is the same. My fingertips tap keys at a speed which leaves my mind in the dust. I start without an end in mind, and my hands take me forward. The words just pour out of me, and if I stop to think about where they’re coming from, I won’t be able to find them. They’ll disappear, evaporate from my tongue. They’ll be gone. It’s like an object in the dark that seems to disappear when you look directly at it. You can just make out it’s shape in your peripheral vision, but the instant you turn your head, it’s gone.

So, I keep writing. I let my fingers move as fast as they desire, and I watch the words appear on my screen with wonder.

Where am I going with this?

I have no idea.

But that’s half the fun.

To Kill the ‘Rona

“Oh my God,” I shouted, leaping out of bed. “This is it. I’ve got the ‘Rona.” I waddled from the bedroom to the bathroom mirror and stared down my throat.

            “What are you doing now?” Mike groaned from the bedroom.

            “My throat is sore. I’ve got it. We’re infected. We’re doomed.”

            “For Pete’s sake…” Mike joined me in the bathroom and shook his head. “You’re fine.”

            “I must kill these germs before I get the virus!” I exclaimed irrationally.

            “You know, I don’t think that’s how it—”

            “Salt water! When you have a sore throat, you’re supposed to gargle with salt water!” I announced.

            “Here we go.”

            I raced from the master bath into the kitchen and tore through the cupboards.

            “Pink Himalayan Salt ought to do it,” I murmured, cracking some fine crystals into a cup, and filling it with warm water. I gargled a few times, aware of Mike’s judgmental stare on my back.

            “That’s probably not doing–,”

            “You’re right!” I cut him off. I dumped out the water and handed him the salt grinder. “Crack some of this right on my throat!”

            “…You’re serious?”

            “Come on, man, time is of the essence here!” I snapped my fingers in his face.

            Mike rolled his eyes. “Fine. Lay down on the couch.”

            I launched over the back of the couch, laid flat on the cushions, and then squeezed my eyes shut. “Do it.”

            Then I heard Mike chuckle.

I realized in this frozen slice of time between the vibrations of his voice that I made a grave mistake. In my irrationality, I completely disregarded the fact that I cannot trust my prankster husband with a task like this. I didn’t have time to react before GIANT salt crystals were colliding with the back of my throat.

            He turned the grain size on the grinder from “Light Dusting” to “Fucking Massive.”

            “ARG!” I yelled, fumbling up, coughing, cursing. “What did you do?!”

            Mike doubled over in laughter.

            “You ass!” I shouted, sprinting into the kitchen, and thrusting my mouth under the tap to chase down the colossal salt crystals clinging to my tonsils.

            As I was sputtering in the sink, Mike calmly took two glasses from the cupboard, then withdrew a frosty bottle from the back of the freezer.

            “This is no time to panic,” he lectured. “Be calm. Be cool. Be smart. Stay healthy.”

I wiped my face and crossed my arms as he poured.

“This is nothing a little whiskey won’t kill,” Mike said cheerfully.

            I scowled at him, but took the glass he offered me.

“To quarantine,” he saluted, clinking his glass to mine.

“To quarantine.”

And we haven’t stopped drinking since.

Related:

The Age of No Pants

Reasons Why I Drink (Today Edition)

Reasons Why I Drink (Today Edition)

As the clock displays 5:00, I shuffle down the stairs and into the kitchen. (I may or may not be wearing pants, and it’s fine, because, ‘Rona.) I scratch my Doberman Pinscher’s head, then rummage through the wine fridge.

Today, I am uncorking this bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon because I am waiting.

I am waiting for a closing date on my refinance.

I am waiting for someone to come hook up my fiber internet.

I am waiting for two agents to get back to me about my manuscript.

I am waiting for someone to finish building my pole barn.

I am waiting for my insurance company to call me back.

I am waiting for the credit union to mail me my stupid debit card.

I am waiting for quarantine to end.

I am waiting for that damn Amazon package.

I am waiting for warmer weather.

I am waiting for Susan at work to finally respond to my email.

I am waiting for Netflix to load, because I still have shitty internet.

I am waiting for my friend in Vietnam to wake up and see the hilarious meme I left on her Messenger.

I am waiting for this damn zit on my face to go away.

I am waiting for 10,000 followers to fly out my ass.

And my mind is exploding, because I am an adult who uses words like “refinance,” “fiber,” “building,” “agents,” “insurance,” “debit,” and “Quarantine” in complete, exasperated sentences while I drain an entire bottle of wine.

Sometimes it feels like all we do is wait. We are constantly anticipating the following moment, the coming week, the next greatest thing. We are waiting for this to end, for that to start, for this to come, for that to leave.

I think I’m waiting to stop waiting.

I am waiting for the day there is no longer anything to wait for.

Does that exist?

Wait and see.

The Age of No Pants

Can we all agree it is exceptionally difficult to pretend to be an adult when the world is on fire?

I’m feeling unsettled. My mind cannot quite process the Amazon driver wearing a facemask, or the dystopian line with 6 feet of space between each person outside Home Depot because they won’t let more than 75 in at a time. The lack of paper products on the grocery store shelves is mind-blowing, and my pizza delivery was left on my porch yesterday.

Social horror aside, I haven’t worn real pants in about three months, and that is not something adults do.

I should be keeping a journal of the events taking place throughout this unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, because one day, my grandchildren will ask about it, and only one thing will stick out.

“What was it like living through a pandemic, Grandmother?” (For some reason, in my head, my grandchildren are British.)

“Ah yes,” I’ll tell them, looking philosophically into space as I sink my old bones into the memory. “The Age of No Pants.”

As a writer, it is no surprise I am naturally an introvert. I was born for social distancing. I love working my day job from home. I love hanging out with my dog and spending the evenings writing and 100%-ing Breath of the Wild while I drink a couple bottles of wine.

I love not wearing pants.

But I can’t even take myself seriously when I am sitting in a Zoom meeting knowing I am a business mullet. (Professional on the top, party on the bottom.)

The Age of No Pants aside, I think the question our grandchildren will most likely be asking is not about the pandemic itself, but life before the pandemic.

“What was it like before the world changed?”

Kind of the same. Kind of not.

I don’t know what will happen next…but I do know I can feel an imminent shift. We won’t come out of this shiny. We will crawl from it, squinting in new light.

Pantsless.

Unpredictability is the scariest part of this, I think. But we’re not alone. We might be pantsless in our living room with only our cats and dogs and a few empty bottles of cabernet, but we’re not alone.

Drop me a follow for more on #adulting and “the ‘rona.” Some relatable, light-hearted reading is exactly what we need right now!

And for My Next Trick: 10,000 Followers Will Fly Out My Ass

Maybe it’s time I join the circus.

At this point, I’m damn good at juggling. Even as I type, I have about seven things floating above my head that I’m going to need to catch and toss again in a few seconds. I’ll use my feet if I must. It’s fine. I’ve done it before. I’ll be a clown in the circus, juggling my day job, my writing career, my family, my friends, my finances, my marketing, my diet, a facemask, and whatever else the universe decides to throw into the mix. Maybe it will just tell me to dance as I juggle. Move to the beat, swallow a sword, and tie your hands behind your back.

It’s fine.

Everything is fine.

I’ve written before about how adulting can be a lot. But I think the burden gets a little heavier when the thing you want most is about two inches beyond the reach of your fingertips. And within the space of two inches is about 10,000 sets of eyes.

“So how long have you been writing?” The agent asked me as I relaxed a little in my seat. I had just pitched my speculative fiction novel, Aftershock, over a Zoom meeting, and he asked me to email him the entire manuscript.

Talk about thunderstruck.

We still had 4 minutes left, and my tongue couldn’t pluck a single coherent sentence from my brain. Perhaps he could tell I was internally sputtering like an engine starved for gas, so he took the lead, and we both accepted our fate would be four minutes of small talk.

“I’ve been writing my whole life,” I told him. “I have a blog, #adulting. Light-hearted humor and relatable stories.”

The agent lit up. “What’s the URL?” He asked.

I gave it to him and explained the premise.

“How many followers do you have?”

I stumbled. I spent hours last night reciting a pitch for Aftershock. I wasn’t anywhere close to pitching a #adulting project.

“Only a handful,” I admitted. Twenty-five, to be exact. Whoopie. (Also, love you guys.)

“I just spoke to an editor yesterday about wanting to do a project similar to this,” the agent enlightened.

I think my left lung sprang a leak. It blew around my ribcage like a flying balloon, and for once in my life, I did not have words.

“I love the idea. But for something like that to work, you’d need about 10,000 followers. Then we could talk.”

Oh, is that all? Dude, I don’t even have enough friends for each finger on my hand!

I can’t remember what I said next, but I must have said something, and I hope to sweet baby Jesus it wasn’t dumb.

“I’ve seen it done in a month,” he continued. “If you really go for it and you do it right, you can get 10,000 followers in a month.”

Who, me?

I am a fumbling fool trying to figure out what I am supposed to be doing with my life, and here I am, literally 9,975 people away from getting something I’ve wanted since the 4^th grade.

Let me just place this red nose on my face and hop on a unicycle as I juggle.

And for my next trick? 10,000 followers will fly out my ass!

I’m about to start cranking some serious content, ya’ll. Because I want this more than anything in the world. Drop me a like and a follow. Share with your friends. Let’s turn this circus act into a dream and pull a book deal out of my hat.

Follow me on Facebook

Follow me on Instagram

Follow me on WordPress

Let’s do this.

Fragments of me

I’m fumbling

Stumbling and crumbling, gathering discarded pieces of myself as they flake off along the way. I press onward, my arms overflowing with fragments of me.

Fumbling and stumbling…crumbling…

…and humbling.

No one ever said it would be easy, so I should stop pretending it is.

Adulting is fucking difficult. Balancing life shouldn’t be this hard.

Dealing with emotions I know are normal but also recognize as irrational or selfish or dramatic is tough. Have I not outgrown jealousy? Am I not too old to be threatened? Should I not be immune to heartbreak or rage?

No.

We’re adults. Not robots.

Can you imagine us as adult robots? There’s my next speculative fiction novel. Adults engineered into robots at 18 so they can handle responsibility and success without pesky feelings. Execution, no emotion. Objectives, no adventure.

Here’s the thing… there can’t be happy without the sad sometimes. There can’t be success without some failure.

Adulting doesn’t mean you can’t feel the same emotions you’ve always felt. I suppose it means I can’t slap Janet across the face when she insults me…I should probably use big girl words instead. But I can still freely feel that fury stemming from her ignorance. Human emotion and reaction will never go away, no matter how old or advanced we become.

How we handle inevitable floods of sudden emotion is what makes us an adult. I’ve evolved. How I handle emotion now is much different from how I handled it as a child.

Publicly, anyway.

I mean… I might throw myself to the floor and scream for chocolate in private… but that’s my business.

The point here, I think, is that sometimes I handle emotion well… like an adult should. Other times I don’t. But I do learn from that. I pick up those pieces and continue down this unpredictable journey called life

The Universe I Create

Between the hemispheres of my brain, within the confines of my skull, a million words are flying. They’re soaring across an intricate web of thought. They build a world, letter by letter, a place only I can see when I close my eyes.

I am sane.

I am an adult.

I know it is all in my head.

But it’s real to me.

In my head, there’s a place only I can hide. In my brain, there’s a world I constructed from dust. In my mind lives a man with a villain to fight. It is all fantasy that only I can experience, places only I can know, people only I can love.

It’s just me and the universe I create with letters and words and precise punctuation that alters meaning and shatters perception.

Just me.

Until the day I pick up a pen, scrape it across paper. Until that moment I tenderly tap keys. Until the world I’ve built writhes and churns and the words overflow. They cascade from my ears and trickle to my palms. I hold them, just for a second, just until they start to drip from the spaces between my fingers. Then I release them, uncup my hands and splash them into the world.

I write them. I write them all, so that this place might become real…so that these people might be loved. They aren’t just characters, concrete and simple. They carry a message and tell a story and mean something more than just what they are. They’re a product of my passion and the fruit of my talent and the result of emotion firing and misfiring in my cortex.

“Stop playing pretend and be an adult.”

These characters are apart of me, imprints behind my eyes. I will be 108 before I put down a pen and give up my passion.

“Characters aren’t real. Don’t waste your time developing them.”

They’re real to me, and they carry a message of love and resilience and acceptance and hope that so many of us in this world need. Character development is vital to the success of a story. They don’t deserve to be blurry.

“You’ll never get published, save yourself the time and disappointment.”

57 rejections. 4 manuscript requests. Two writer’s conferences. Three agent cards, two almost-had-its, a new writer’s laptop, a custom logo, a website, and another four cold queries. Not a single instant have I felt like I’ve wasted even a nanosecond of my time. I look wonderful failure in the face and analyze how I can use that to get better. If that isn’t #adulting, I am not sure what is. Failure is not disappointment. Failure is glorious opportunity.

Someday, the world will read these words and feel these emotions and meet these characters. They will live forever, permanently stamped on paper to outlive my body and change the world long after I’m gone.

And I will smile every step of the way, because I’m killing it.

We’re killing it.

Mail in a Pile on the Counter

Time is bizarre. 

It’s something we can spend and save, make and waste, choose and lose. We can have too much, but mostly have too little. Time can fly, and time can also crawl. It moves systematically forward but never backward, and it never, ever stops.  

The concept of time makes my brain hurt sometimes. How can an hour seem to sluggishly drag by, while the last 28 years whirled by me, knocked me over, yanked me onward in its wake? It is stumbling to consider time lost and wasted is something we can never get back. And in those quiet, most precious moments that snuggle beside our hearts and leave a lingering imprint, we want so badly for time to stop. We long for it to halt in its tracks, pump the brakes, freeze around us in those minutes we wish to last forever.  

But it won’t.

Time will always continue on, and it will shove you along with it, because it never leaves anything behind. 

As children, time is something that just can’t seem to run fast enough. We can’t wait to grow up. We can’t wait for that vacation next month. We can’t wait for dinner. We. Can’t. Wait. Then suddenly we stop running and wish we could back up. We want to turn around, go back, do it all over, take it slower. But we can’t. Time’s magnetic field keeps pulling us onward. 

As an adult, I never have enough time. 24 hours is not sufficient. I cannot work full-time, cook, clean, work out, home improve, walk the dog, grocery shop, get gas, water my plants, weed, mow, catch up on Stranger Things, call my mother, see my friends, scroll Facebook, make all those Pinterest projects, fold laundry, practice piano, write my novel, and get at least 7 hours of sleep in 24 hours! IT’S NOT POSSIBLE. 

I’ve come to the conclusion that adulting means making time. Adults learn to prioritize and learn to function with little sleep and learn how to balance all the little things in life that pile up (like that massive pile of mail on my counter that I have no intention of going through any time soon). We have to make time and prioritize. We have to. Because time stops for no one. Prioritizing, like adulting in general, takes practice. Sometimes we’ll let things slip. Like the mail. Or the weeds. Sometimes even friends. 

It seems more difficult to maintain friendships now, especially when we have different priorities, incomes, lifestyles, careers, schedules, and locations. It used to be so effortless. Texting and Facebooking daily came so naturally and we had all the time in the world to meet up for spur-of-the-moment Hobby Lobby extravaganzas. Now, suddenly, my evenings are packed with the above list while I dump extra energy into a new job and I save whatever I have left for the struggle to launch a writing career. We’ve all got lists like this. We all have our shit and sometimes it’s not fun. But it’s part of adulting and we make it work. 

Watching those around me grow and blossom into adults over time (even if they feel like they’re faking it sometimes) has been fascinating. I’m an observer. That is, I watch people. While the greatest obstacle for me is to put in a syllable in casual conversation, watching it all happen comes naturally. I watch the way their lips move as they talk, or the habitual gestures they use as they tell a story. The way they smile can be worth more than the words they utter. Perhaps most interesting of all is the speaker’s eyes. It’s the level of intensity swirling within them that really tells the story. An observer soaks in every word and detail, storing it away. I don’t only learn about the speaker; I learn about the entire human race. 

I’ve watched many different people from different backgrounds and with different aspirations develop into adults and become parents. In fact, my husband and I are one of the only couples within my friend group without children. I think there’s an irony here, because everyone always thought I’d be first. I’ve always wanted a whole pack of babies, my own baseball team to fill the rooms of this house. As I observe everyone around me, I think maybe I should be feeling like I’m running out of time, like there’s this biological clock slowly ticking away as the world continues to spin. 

But I don’t. 

For the first time in my adult life, I feel like I have all the time in the world. Or, maybe I feel like I simply don’t have the time to take that leap yet. I have time, I don’t have time, who knows? Like I said, the concept of time makes my brain hurt. 

Adulting doesn’t mean becoming a parent. I will, one day, when I can figure out how to adjust all those priorities and fit my large to-do list into 24 hours. But in the meantime, I will fluidly move with time, spin with the earth, observe the beautiful transitions around me, and leave the mail in a pile on the counter.

Preschool Style

The concept of friendship is almost bizarre if you really think about it. What’s the moment your relationship with another human being suddenly moves beyond an acquaintance or coworker or stranger and into this friendship zone that comes along with a certain understanding of each other?

What drop of rain overflows the bucket?

As a child, forming friendships is effortless.

“Do you want to play with us at lunch?” The third-grade strawberry blonde called Rachel walked up to me. She had bangs, and her hair was straight around her shoulders. She wore a pink zip jacket with purple legging pants and nearly white tennis shoes that lit up as she waddled. She smiled, a front tooth missing.

“Okay,” I said quietly, shuffling my feet and brushing my tangled hair behind one of my ears.

“Nikki and I are going to play animals. We are shivering in the cold by the tree, waiting for someone to come rescue us.”

“Okay,” I said again. “Can I be a kitty?” Which is funny, because as an adult I am certainly not a cat person. Something living in my house that poops in a box and hops on my counter? No thanks.

“Nikki is the kitty,” Rachel said matter-of-factly. “I’m a puppy. Maybe you can be the bunny?”

I didn’t argue; I was just happy to be included. I twitched my nose like a bunny and stuck my teeth out in front of my lower lip. “Bunny,” I repeated.

“Great!” she exclaimed. “We will meet you by the tree after lunch time!”

Animal games at recess turned into lunchtime conversations, and lunchtime conversations soon gave way to Barbie games on our bedroom floors. Barbie games morphed to soccer games, and phone calls turned into Instant Message conversations on AOL. (If you’re under twenty, you haven’t the slightest idea what I’m talking about.)  Through these transitions, Rachel became my best friend. I met Rachel in the year 2000.  We’ve been best friends for nineteen years. And for fourteen of those years and counting, 300 miles sat between us.

We must be doing something right, here.

Somehow, we’ve gone from shivering animals to women with careers and houses and husbands.

WHAT just HAPPENED?

I want to talk about love for a moment. Because the concept of love and understanding it is #adulting. I don’t want to talk about the romantic love you think you feel at 16, or you know you feel at 30. Not a sexual love or feeling of lust. Right now, I’m talking about feeling love for another person, regardless of sex or age. Much like the love you feel for your sister or your father. But this person isn’t blood.

I’m talking about looking at someone and feeling like your world is so different with them in it.  It’s the difference between “I love you” and “I’m in love with you”.

Someone once asked me if I loved my best friend, if I loved Rachel. I wasn’t sure how to respond. They then prompted me, “if she died, would you cry?”

“Well, yes,” I agreed.
“Then you love her.”
Fair enough. But I cried when a friend’s mother passed on. Does that mean I loved my friend’s mother? Or did I cry out of remorse for my friend? I cried when I learned of Alan Rickman’s death. Does that mean I loved him? (Well. I did. But I didn’t know him. Just his characters. And that intoxicating way of speech.)

This “love” word gets tossed around a lot. We say it to our friends and coworkers like it’s just another word. I do think it is overused, but I also think it’s not just meant for the romantic feelings you feel for someone.

I love my husband. I love my sister and my parents and my grandparents and my aunts and uncles and cousins. I also love Rachel.

I was in 9^th grade when I realized that. I was moving away from the small town of Columbia Station in Ohio and heading all the way to Rockford, Michigan with my family. Looking back, this truly was the best move for my family, and everything worked out well. But when you’re in the middle of your freshman year of high school and you’re facing goodbye with your best friend since the third grade, there is no stopping the hot tears rolling down your cheeks.

I said goodbye to a lot of people that night, but I only cried when it came to Rachel.

I didn’t even cry saying goodbye to my boyfriend (who later turned out to be super-hero gay, so it’s all good.)

Despite the miles, we remained close. My connection with her was elastic enough to stretch 300 miles, and I am eternally grateful for that morning she asked a lonely third grader to play.

Why isn’t making friends that easy as an adult? Why can’t I sit beside you on our lunch break and claim you as mine? If I did that, you’d probably look at me funny and take your lunch elsewhere. But you should be so lucky for me to claim you. I’m a ride-or-die kind of friend. You need a shoulder to cry on? You got it. Need some comic relief? I’m your girl. Need a body buried? I own 7 acres.

The fact is, we don’t talk to one another like we used to. Perhaps children hold this elusive innocence and an uncomplicated understanding of the world. This innocence leads them to asking the new girl to play animals by the tree, and it changes her life forever.

Adults don’t do that, but maybe we should.

Let’s kick it preschool style.