And we hope

To be clear, I get not picking us up out of fear. I do. Even sitting here, his hand on my thigh, wondering just where his hand needs to go for me to jump from a moving car, leaving my stuff behind in his back seat, I get it.

You'll say I shouldn't have got into this car. That just looking at him it's obvious that there's something wrong. That he looks sketchy.

But, while it can be amusing, at first, to watch empty cars drive by with the driver staring at the other side of the road as if there was a fourteen car pile-up with bodies scattered through wind shields and under tires, or full cars with the driver looking at us giving their best impression of a sad face smiley while shrugging, the amusement goes away. The hot sun. Or the rain. Or the coming darkness. They make sure of it. And then we get into the first car that stops for us.

They

My brother and my father have always been into jigsaw puzzles. They'd dump the contents of the box onto the kitchen table, sort out the end pieces to build the frame, sort the rest by colours, and they'd work through these monsters day by day. Dinner, naturally, would be served in the living room.

Sometimes, for fun, I would steal a piece early on. So that I could have the distinction of finishing the puzzle.

To me, jigsaws are incomprehensible. It seems that, given enough time, a brute force strategy will complete every puzzle.

Unless some jerk steals a piece.

Counting backwards from ten

In nursing, pain is often self-assessed on a scale from one to ten. One of our teachers, in nursing school, she had us all put up our hands, and she counted backwards from ten, asking us to drop our hands when that level of pain would be tolerable. There were only two hands still up when she said her final number. Mine was one of them.

She was, of course, talking about physical pain. Something that can be cured with a pill.

We don't have a pill for emotional pain. But imagine if we did, at what point, counting backwards from ten, would your hand drop to grab one?