1) The evening air is perfect when I step out of the office – crisp, clear, cold. The kind of weather that makes me feel like I can breathe. I take a snap of the dark sky and send it to my husband with a caption about earning my pay. It’s 1099 season. I am tired, but I am happy.

2) On this Wednesday I have canceled all my appointments so I can lie on my black Chesterfield sofa with my baby. She’s almost not a baby anymore; she runs about and has firm opinions and seems to understand most of the things I say to her. But today she seems like a baby; she lies on my chest wide awake but completely still. I drink hot tea and we watch Love Actually and cuddle. It’s a lovely moment. Except we’re both sick.

3) I’m driving towards an office on this Friday afternoon, playing I Am A Stone by Demon Hunter, when I catch a glimpse of something in the rearview mirror. My daughter, dressed in a mustard yellow Calvin Klein jumpsuit, sitting in her carseat, hands resting open on her legs, listening to the music, gazing out of the window with her blue, blue eyes. She’s such a little person in this moment. I wonder what she is thinking.

4) The fire dances and falls, and the metal sides of the firepit block the heat of the flames in an irritating fashion. I sit, wrapped in my trenchcoat, across from two women with brown hair and beautiful eyes. We watch the flames lick the logs and feel the cold licking our bones, and we discuss color theory and friendship dynamics. This is a moment that did not happen by accident or without effort, and I am grateful to be here.

5) It’s 5:30 in the morning and my baby is freshly fed and asleep on my chest, wrapped in my arms. I can feel the push and pull of her little body against mine as she breathes in and out, and the small movements of her mouth as she sucks on nothing in her sleep. I hear her breathe, and sometimes she’ll sigh more vocally. Her little arm hangs down my side, like a half-embrace. She is three months and two days old. She is soft and perfect.

6) It’s a party. The room has been transformed from the utilitarian clutter of an office breakroom into a place of gold-framed mirrors and green-leafed plants and metallic balloons and white-clothed tables holding brilliant roses and tiny disco balls. There are platters of food and KitKats arranged to look like a piano and a white cake with pink and gold candles. It’s a party because of me, but not for me. I was the one who decided it should exist, and I was the one who, with help, made it happen. And I did good. The space is pretty and the food is good and the guest of honor is happy. And now there are more guests, women in pretty little dresses and men in whatever combination of jeans or shorts, t-shirts or button-down shirts that pleased them, and I stand at one side of the room and watch them and it occurs to me that I am halfway good at throwing a party. I am good at it until the people show up. And now I don’t know what to do with them.

7) I’m walking on a road that I’ve walked literally hundreds of times, under a morning-colored sky. My husband is beside me, and our daughter rides in a jogging stroller in front of him, her hair wild, her pajama-clad feet propped up on the drink tray. There’s a train rumbling past on the tracks that run alongside this street, and my head is turned to watch it because of the graffiti splashed across the cars. In some ways graffiti seems like the purest form of art to me – it’s made and then released into the world, never to be sold, possibly never to be seen by the artist again. Creating for the sake of creation.

8) The fields are brilliantly green, but the trees are brown and gray. I’m driving alone, 85 mph, under skies as blue as summer, crisscrossed with jetstreams. The sun reflects off the worn asphalt road and my speakers thump with the music of Masked Wolf and Saint Mesa and The Script. Yesterday I came home from a vacation and today I feel exactly the way one wants to feel after a vacation: refreshed and delighted to be getting back to work. I pull into my parking space exactly as the song ends.

9) I’m following my daughter over concrete floors, between towering shelves of secondhand books. She is barefoot and blue-eyed, wearing a white lace romper with a fluffy tulle pearl-seeded skirt. Somewhere in this store is my husband and a recipe book that will decide our evening meal, but for now I am completely engaged in keeping this child from tearing the books from the shelves and in admiring the beauty in the contrast of her white lace and the concrete and the books.