“Here, have a banana.” Everyone freezes for a second; then we all burst out laughing at the same time. Including Cooper, who rests his chin in his palm and massages his temple with his other hand. “I’ll pass,” he says. I’ve never seen Luis so red. “Why couldn’t it have been apple day?”

You find out who your real friends are when stuff like this happens. Turns out I didn’t have any, but I’m glad Cooper does.

You can meet my lizard.” It takes a few seconds of silence for me to realize how that might be interpreted. “That’s not a line. I have an actual lizard. A bearded dragon named Stan.”

Here, the streets were so quiet. We were two miles from our old apartment. Easily, I could imagine how quickly a sort of amnesia might kick in; how tempting it would be to let this new silence swaddle us. 'Happiness' does not have to be synonymous with 'complacency' of course. But now I better understood how a person might unconsciously begin to draw the curtains, turning a home into a walled garden. Would we forget about our homeless neighbors if we were no longer living within earshot of one another? If we weren’t literally rubbing shoulders? On our first night in the new house, this seemed like something dangerous to guard against.

The most critical, defining battles we wage in life, we wage alone.
Against ourselves.