Everyone told me that everyone was breaking up or breaking down or breaking through those days—these days, these days, everyone said—something in the ether, it seemed, was pushing them all to the edges of whatever they were in. The pandemic was entering year three, and a friend’s paranoid delusions returned, and there were miscarriages and estrangements, and nearly everyone’s marriage was ablaze, and addicts were playing chicken with their addictions, and spouses were meeting strangers at the airport, then calling from foreign countries to say they’re never coming home again, and the piano player couldn’t play the piano, and the ex-wives became anti-vaxxers, and the neighbors kept calling the cops—please, dear God, please, do something—and all the while I kept writing down the facts, the sometimes barely believable facts of how much seemed to be changing, eroding, losing control, and I began to wonder if this has always been the reason I’ve written anything at all—to break reality down into a story, or to make a story into a reality. For a little while I wondered if there was measurably more chaos in late 2021, but it was much simpler than that. It’s natural to pay attention to the unceasing troubles of others when, like passing by mirrored windows, you notice yourself in them.