Lots of them, in fact. Snow in Central Park. Laughing, giddy, with Leonard and Sumana and Brendan and Kat and Claire and Julia, saying “What do you wanna do now? Shall we go see that show, what’s it called, the one about Hamilton? Yeah, let’s go see Hamilton!” Sitting around the evening campfires on Diamond Beach, toasting Mum and Dad with gin and tonic and love. Walking into La Sagrada Familia and feeling my knees buckle. Christmas Eve, when we saw the Bernal coyote, her golden eyes, her wild face. And every single moment with Sam Horse, my wisest, kindest teacher since last January 1.

When I went back to church in November, I chose an Episcopalian (Anglican) church because of a dark wave of rage and grief and protest that rose inside me, to the effect that it was my mother’s church and her mother’s church before her, and terrible men tried to take it from me, and they can’t have it, because it’s mine. So too this year. So, too, my life.

1. Gorgeous memoirs of appalling events

• A Very Easy Death
• From a Clear Blue Sky
• Reckoning: A Memoir
• Wave

2. Rich, thinky SF by women

• Necessity
• Lagoon
• The Goblin Emperor
• All The Birds in the Sky

3. Excellent narrative history on audiobook

• This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
• The Guns of August
• The Summit: Bretton Woods, 1944: J. M. Keynes and the Reshaping of the Global Economy
• The Gene: An Intimate History

4. My own sundered history, restored to me in various ways

• A Field Guide to Aboriginal Rock Engravings: With Special Reference to Those Around Sydney
• Repossession Of Our Spirit: Traditional Owners Of Northern Sydney
• Anthology of Australian Aboriginal Literature
• Forgotten War

5. In spite of everyone who says how good they are, really very, very good

• My Brilliant Friend
• The Story of a New Name
• Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
• The Story of the Lost Child

1. Slow-dancing with Captain Calkins to White Christmas this afternoon, in a sunbeam, under the mistletoe

2. Taking a Lyft home from Erik’s memorial last night, weeping, and then talking heart-to-heart to my driver about his friend who died of cancer in El Salvador on Wednesday

3. Jeremy’s birthday dinner at Gary Danko on Wednesday, the highlights of which were the cheese cart, and the fact that we were so obviously enjoying one another’s company that when a cake with a candle appeared it read not “Happy Birthday” but “Happy Anniversary”

4. Hearing Mae Jemison talk about space: “I wasn’t scared. I loved it. If I could’ve stayed out there in a glass bubble with my cat, I’d still be there”

5. Learning how to use the indirect rein with Sam Horse, and feeling his movement flow into a more consistent contact and his pleased response: Huh. You’re leveling up.

“I keep thinking there’s a beach at the end of this,” a friend said. “An island, and we’ll be happy again.”

His mother left yesterday after his cremation and when I walked her to the cab, she said to me: ‘I think the reason I was put on earth was for these last two months.’”

One cannot expect people to live in a state of perpetual horror and outrage. Eventually they subside. Fatigue sets in, burnout, boredom, acceptance—and the attention span turns to something else. How could it be otherwise? Yet all of this is strange.

You’re worse than evil. You’re inefficient.