I decided the other day that I’m still alive, and of course that is one of those statements people make that turn out to be both heartfelt and hackneyed. That doesn’t mean it’s not true, it’s just that it feels both awkward and obvious.

What did it mean to be alive today? Well, so far, it meant that I told a couple of friends this morning that I had decided I was still alive, and they nodded their heads. One, like me, saw her husband (and then her parents) through the end of life in one long marathon over the course of a couple of years. She knew just what I meant, she thought, though she told me that my husband’s spirit is with me. I disagree. He’s a box of ashes in the cemetery and a lot of complicated memories, but he is not, in fact, haunting my house, thank god. He would be just as badly behaved as my friend’s husband, if not worse; I didn’t like her husband because he was both easily angered and childish, and he would be stumping around grumbling. My husband, if he was haunting my house, would probably be pretending to work up in his study, and smoking, because dead people can’t die of cancer.

The other friend I told about my decision is younger, but she just lost her mother, and she nodded vehemently and also said she knew just what I meant. She doesn’t. Nobody does. That’s okay.

Being alive also meant that I didn’t sleep well last night, for no particular reason; in fact, I got up around 2:00 having given up on the fruitless effort, and arranged myself in my recliner with an AskReddit about bizarre ways people have been fired or laid off. That killed a couple of hours, and then I took a nap until my normal waking time, dreaming of answers to the New York Times Spelling Bee game, which I had looked at in between reading Reddit.

Another manifestation of life: I knitted several more rows on the sock I’m making. I took up knitting a sock to keep me from sneaking looks at my phone or fidgeting in meetings. It works very well, except for the fact that the sock keeps coming off the double-pointed needles in the bag so the first few minutes of knitting is taken up with picking up many dropped microscopic stitches in the fingering yarn I’m using. I have knit many socks in my prior incarnation as a living human being, many years ago, and honestly I never really wore them much. They are just something to do. I gather that’s how the living spend some of their time when they are not sleeping, and I am earnestly imitating them.

In the service of continued forward momentum, I bought a combination lock at the hardware store and went to the gym I just joined, where I did one of the workouts on the gym’s app. I am in pretty bad shape right now, both in my appearance and in my physical strength, and I was terribly sad about having to do things like jumping jacks right out in the open where people could see me. Also, I was using their lowest weights to do all the dumbbell exercises, and this is saddening because I have in previous lives been both strong and fit. It’s a low-key chain gym that has “No Judgment Zone” everywhere, but I judged myself nonetheless, because I really didn’t like the way I looked in the mirror. This narcissism, I conclude, is part of the package. Afterwards, I was sweating sufficiently, and did not manage to injure myself or have too many muscle spasms, and left feeling that I had achieved something resembling what other people apparently do.

I got home and went to the FIFA Fan Fest around the corner from my house with the intention of scoring one of the souvenir plastic charm bracelets you can put together at the Bank of America pavilion. So did everyone else in the city, apparently. They stopped handing out wristbands for making bracelets after I had been in line for half an hour, so I went home and took a nap. Many living people actually do such things with their time. My excuse is that I have a grandchild who might like the bracelet, but it’s a poor excuse. I don’t actually need an excuse.

Today, I have also finished reading several books, including The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck (got it for free from the local Little Free library; it’s moderately jokey stoicism from someone with a blog), The He-Man Effect: How American Toymakers Sold You Your Childhood (a graphic non-fiction work that I think my adult kid would like, being a parent themself and also having grown up in the early stages of the most ferocious movie and TV tie-ins), and Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (damn, it’s good). I read these as I have always read everything, which is to say in gulps, skipping bits, remembering some of what the book contained, forgetting the rest, and finishing with the impression that I have encountered something. As an experience, it was far superior to, say, reading a Reddit thread on getting fired, and massively better than scrolling Instagram. However, I now have three books to dispose of, and I should take them to the little free library and then go to the real library tomorrow.

My house has gotten more untidy as a result of all this activity. It is only by bringing entropy to a standstill and freezing time that I can keep things organized, I realize. I may have to put up with extra books, dishes in the sink, and having to take a shower if I insist on continuing this course of action. This is the problem with being alive, I think. It’s messy, it’s very ambiguous, and I have to keep cleaning up after myself.