You are a creature defined by your routines: you wake up, gulp water, then go pee while your cat gallops into the kitchen to show you his food bowl, which he assumes you have never seen before and wouldn’t even remember to feed him if he didn’t remind you. This is where the routine slightly diverges, because your kitchen part of your morning is a juggle of feeding Ned, starting to make breakfast, and making coffee. Always french press coffee, and always the same thing for breakfast: two eggs, scrambled, with spinach and mushrooms and lentils what??, topped by cheese. Yes, you’re boring, but you’re also dull! In reality, it’s just easier to make a habit of your first meal while you’re groggy.

You hop in the shower, throw clothes on, and tackle the day. If you’re working that day, you make sure you have everything before you leave: keys, wallet, phone, work keys, work phone, mask. You bike to work in the radiant Portland summer. You get to work, to more routines. The staff at your job has been split into two teams (that way if someone on one team gets sick and that team quarantines, the other teams splits again). This means that you work a regular pattern of days, interwoven with the other team doing the same. You like your coworkers a lot and miss working with the coworkers on the other team. You are not writing this only because you know they might read it. You promise.

Your days at work are spent mostly with no client contact, but the majority of your coworkers do have client contact. This is the quandary: work and risk exposure, or be unemployed. Your company takes a bonkers amount of precautions to keep its employees safe, and has seemed to bend over backwards to avoid layoffs, even paid you to sit at home for a couple of months and do nothing. You’re crazy loyal to your company and your coworkers, realizing abstractly that “loyalty” to a company isn’t real, it’s a byproduct of capitalism and nothing to necessarily be proud of. Are the steps your company is taking, there out of compassion for the teams of human beings working for them? Or, far more sinister, is it just out of a desire to avoid litigation if anyone does fall ill, and keep employees productive because training new employees takes more cost and resources than keeping current ones healthy? In your case, your instinct is that it’s more the former than the latter, but that dark cynicism keeps rearing its head.

When you’re not working, your days are filled with creative projects: writing scripts for your COVID-era webseries, or filming for the same, or taking silly staged photos, or taking photos of The Balloons. Whew. Those balloon photos have taken on a life of their own. For the uninitiated (if that even exists), they’re photos of people’s quotes spelled out in the type of balloons usually reserved for baby showers, gender reveals, and birthdays. It’s always weirdly wonderful for any artist to have a signature work that they’re known for (Box Wine Boyfriend, anyone?), but this would not have been the one you guessed would hit this big.

You don’t use a watermark for the photos. In general, you dislike the way watermarks look, and specifically, the photos get shared and reshared so often that you don’t want it to appear that you’re taking credit for someone else’s words. So, you’re in a good many of them yourself, literally doing the least: maybe with a confused or concerned expression, maybe holding a prop, maybe coordinating your outfit with the usually brightly colored wall and balloons. “I love her lack of energy. Go on gurl, give us nothing”. This has had the unintended side effect of you being recognized for the art. First seldom, but now daily, which is strange but fine. You get to meet a lot of interesting, nice people, and the quotes you curate, often centering around mental health or social justice, seem to help people more than hurt.

You don’t always get it right with the messages though, and you wonder where your initial defensiveness, your fragility comes from, when you get it wrong and you’re criticized. We grow up becoming our habits, we grow up becoming the love we’ve known, and you’re no exception. In the end, you realize it costs you nothing to admit when you’re wrong, and do better the next time. In a year where your body sometimes gives reminders that you’re no spring chicken, you’re grateful that at least your ability to learn and grow remains flexible and nimble.

In the meantime you float from day to day and the summer (the season, not the person) drifts by, hot and lazy. Speaking of floating, you and your friends get together to go river tubing in the Clackamas. It always seems like a logistical nightmare but Summer (the person, not the season) whips it into shape and then there you all are, in cars with masks on. You suggest going to the Upper McIver park launch ramp instead of the lower like y’all planned, figuring it’ll add a few minutes onto your float. The five of you hobble into the water on the slimy rocks and then plop into your tubes. Nick borrowed a pool-grade tube from a friend which is filled with glitter confetti and is fabulous and which promptly sinks about an hour into the float. Luckily you brought your pink flamingo float as a backup so he makes the transfer safely.

Another hour into the (presumably) five hour float and your friends who scouted ahead tell the rest of you that there was an old man by the edge of the water, warning about bumpy waters ahead. It sounds like they’ve actually encountered the Disneyland animatronic in Pirates of the Caribbean, the first one you see after the boat launches, who warns riders as they drift by in his accent to beware of pirates “lurking in every cove”. You seize the moment, describing the comparison to the ride character and asking if the old man was sitting on a rubber mat that looked like grass. They laugh. Encouraged, you go again: “Was there a box behind him with a metal rod going into his back?” Less laughter. You don’t care, you are going to run this joke into the goddamn ground if it is the last thing you do. “Ha, were his hands even touching the strings of the banjo he was playing?” At this you imitate a stiff plastic hand strumming fake strings on your air banjo, but no one is looking, no one is laughing. They are sick of your shit, Mike, like everyone else.

The other funny thing is that the character you mentioned never even talks, on the actual ride he’s just there and silently strumming. It’s the Mandela effect: you just remember that he talks because someone said he does. It’s the skull over the first tunnel entrance that does the talking and no matter how many times you’ve ridden that ride you actually don’t know a word it’s saying because although that chatty skull won’t shut the fuck up, it’s unintelligible. You looked up what it actually says, and hoo-boy is it incredibly racist. No, that’s not true, it’s just a bunch of warnings and “keep your arms inside the ride” and “pirates everywhere” and “follow me on Instagram”; you swear it never said that before. That chatty ass skull is a clout chaser.

Anyway, hours later and a little farther downriver you all go through rapids and Summer hits the shit out of her head on a rock and oh god there’s blood EVERYWHERE like how is a human filled with all this blood surely this is a mistake and she’s scared that it feels like there’s literally a hole in her skull but Allie is brave and determines that there is, in fact, the exact number of holes that should be in Summer’s skull and she staunches the blood with your shirt and you all decide to get off at the next boat ramp and end the river float early (duh) and it turns out that the next ramp is Lower McIver and despite the fact that you all have been floating for hours you’re barely a quarter of the way into the float in fact you’re still in the same park and if Summer hadn’t hit her head you likely would have been floating into the evening and then the night which is not exactly safe in fact it is the opposite of a good idea.

She is okay, by the way, and gets her staples out of her head on Monday. She said to say hello and thanks for your concern.

Other habits, some classic, some new:

*making spritzers out of wine and LaCroix (this is now exclusively how you drink wine and has to be the herald of you slowly turning into an eccentric queer elder)

*having unrequited crushes on men even less available than before (I know) because of the virus and the dumb way your country is handling it. “Do I actually like him or am I wearing Covid Goggles?” Reader, I know. I’m tired of looking too.

*becoming an almost exclusive pescatarian

*binging literal entire seasons of Star Trek in one sitting (okay that’s not possible but still)

As the pandemic threatens to stretch into 2021, and the Black Lives Matter movement shines a light on so much inequality, and the election cycle goes into full swing, and your art takes you into uncharted territory, you realize you’re in a relationship after all. You are married to change, and your life a year from now will look nothing like your life now, and that is okay. Just float.

And you do, you float down the river with your friends, your family all around you, everyone you have ever loved is here floating with you. There are hundreds of us on the river. We live here now, here on the river, sometimes we can touch the bottom with our feet, sometimes we have to lift our butts to make it over the rocky parts, sometimes the depths are deeper than we can fathom. But even in the rocky parts, we know that what’s up ahead is better than where we are now. There is a noise, all of our heads swivel and turn and look up ahead. There is a light up ahead.

You smile and start paddling.