I have a small action figure in my office that I played with every day as a kid. I think it was from an emergency show, but if so, I don’t know why he looks like a redheaded lumberjack. Either way, he carries my childhood inside of him like a guy the size of Paul Bunyan who goes home to take care of a baby rabbit with a tiny milk bottle, and covers it in a fleece he cut to cuddle it.

My daughter used to sleep in the pillow of my Vizsla’s stomach and suck her thumb and twirl her hair. Parenting is incredible. You walk around lonely until you create someone who is part of you. You will never feel lonely in the same way again. Then you get a divorce, and you only get half the days, and your old loneliness now seems like a distant star in a universe of despair.

The kids all looked so excited this morning. Maybe it’s because they know that no teacher will assign homework on the first day. Maybe it’s because they want to show off their new kicks. Maybe they are just happy to be out of their parents’ reach for a change. School is a form of freedom, but also a very tight restriction. Having to ask to use the bathroom makes you feel powerless.

No one says, “Hey honey, I’m house.” Home is a state of mind. It was hard for anything to feel like home to me with my mom gone. Looking back, the difference between a house and a home, to me, was family. When I had my own family, I could’ve lived in a shack and still felt at home. Curated decorations help, but I still feel lonely when they are the only things to welcome me home.

I could overhear her whisper-yelling at my dad and then ramping up the volume for my benefit while I huddled in the basement room playing Bubble Bobble on Nintendo. Pop, pop - it was a fun game. “You do everything for the little Jew boy.” I couldn’t argue with her. I was technically a Jew boy, and my dad did do everything for me. She never called him a Jew man.

I wish my dad left me a 23-minute message once that I could replay for the rest of my life. I wish my grandmother left me a voicemail telling me just how much sugar she used to put in my hot Lipton tea. I even wish my stepmother would text me in what would have been broken Swedelish to get “baloney” sandwiches on a roll with “butr.” I wish my mom just said my name.

When I moved back to Brooklyn as an adult, I walked my kids to their school under the same awning where I grew up every morning. It gave me a personal jolt of happiness every time. If only my mom were still up there and could come down and walk with us.

I broke up with a girl once because she was a bad speller. I would imagine her leaving me a note in the morning, if we lived together, saying, “See you tonigte, hony.” I couldn’t do it. I feel bad because our first date was out of a rom-com. I still look her up from time to time. I’ve never found her online.

In middle school, I once wrote something distasteful about the principal in bubble letters on a piece of paper. I wrote it in bubble letters so they wouldn’t know my handwriting. I was a smart kid, but not as smart as I thought. They called me into the office, and I almost let out a small turd in my tighty whiteys. He asked me to write in bubble letters on a piece of paper right then. They didn’t know the level I was at. I made the letters insane on purpose. I never got in trouble.

A summer day can feel like a blizzard even when it’s not cold. A sack of hammers landing on your big toe. A jellyfish sting that won’t stop stinging. Poison oak. Running fast around the corner of Old Man Jones’ abandoned garage and catching your inner forearm on a rusty nail. Grief is a sharp arrow.

I let my tears run into a jar that I hid under my desk in the back corner of my new room at a new college. I ate giant oatmeal raisin cookies at the mall with my stepbrother, and bought video games at Babbages, to assuage my inner turmoil. I pumped iron over and over until I looked like someone new. I didn’t cut my hair for a year. I was pedaling in place.

Tea snackered with white sugar. Danish sugar cookie tins. Bench seating in the kitchen. Why did I sell this house? Low carpet. Shag carpet. Linoleum floors. Pink cabinets. Pink house.

Trying to explain to people the abstract machinations of my life has been hard. I was in the room…no. I was holding both of my parents’ hands…no. I was right next to both of my parents when they died. Separately. Thirteen years apart. An avalanche of despair.

Hammer me until nails no longer feel like anything. Head hung. An ocean of tears pooling in my belly. Grief. Catatonic, yet walking.

It would be nice if you did this. I understand the sentiment, but I politely decline. I don’t go to parties. I don’t dance. I don’t know how to ride a bike. I don’t show up unannounced. These particles of preference are the atoms of my fleshy knapsack. My effort is a sidecar to that.

A turkey sandwich on a kaiser roll on the back lip of a car’s rear drawbridge. The smell of suntan lotion and the feel of sand sticking to your skin. A revolving door at our house; never knowing which guests would sleep where and when. The summers before, when we were shipped away for two months of absolute bliss on our own in the Berkshires.