This morning I bought an egg-salad sandwich from the cafe at the end of my street; it was packed neatly in saran wrap, crustless, glowingly white, and soft. The egg-salad was whipped and homogenous and might have been said to have been brought into existence exactly as it was, instead of crudely assembled from eggs and mayonnaise and spices. It was small and perfect.

I wasn’t at a loss for what to do—instead I was waiting. May and I liked to make fun of our mother’s tendency to chop advice into compact maxims, though May disagreed with me as to what extent this habit was insidious. A common tidbit was that ‘one shouldn’t worry about what hasn’t happened yet.’ Even May saw the evil in this one—the bullshit—the possibility it contained to lead toward error and misjudgement. Everything that it is possible to worry about is something that hasn’t happened yet. The purpose of bad things having already happened seems to be, at least to me, to presage even worse things. They are the blood in the morning sky before a storm. I don’t believe in the destructive power of isolated catastrophes: they are a writing device—I believe in causal chains of increasing worsening and embaddening and self-convolution, like how a toothache leads to an infection that leads to an abscess that rots the jawbone clean through.

I have a diagram for this concept.

This diagram suggests also a reverse diagram, leading to a much more terrifying, considerably more sleep-depriving concept: the existence of literal seeds of discord.

That I wasn’t worrying about my boyfriend’s disappearance seemed primarily to be because of this diagram, the feeling given by it, and not because of my mother’s maxim. But I thought of the maxim anyway, as well as others that she says, pulling them out of her pockets like chewing gum or mints. Whatever calamity I am now in the midst of, which is now growing and accumulating momentum, it formed long ago and carcinogenously, and definitely endogenously. It is, by now, impervious to whether I chose to obsess over it or not.

Another detail about the ward officer remembered while I sat at one of the cafe’s two-seaters, finger in a groove on its natural wooden slab top: when I described my boyfriend to him, where we have been living, where he appeared to be when I last heard from him, how he had come to find an extended visa in this country, the ward officer had intermittently taken a 手拭 from below his desk and wiped it across his forehead, clearing sweat or dirt that I could not see. Was he nervous, or just warm? It is no great secret that those things that unnerve us, that terrify us, are born from the misapplication of mundane acts and habits. I think of a horror film I saw once whose most terrifying scene involved a woman walking down a hallway, both slow and fast, limbs bent in the wrong ways, jerking, gibbering, everything at the wrong angles. Everything simply in violation. She looked like she might fall, but instead continued to amble forward, because why should the dead be unable to walk? She was just walking. She was, like all of us, just trying to go somewhere? And why should they have to walk like us? And why should we be scared before we even get to know them?

I felt like I had to buy a small iced coffee after I finished my egg-salad sandwich in order to continue to be able to sit in the cafe, to secure good graces, even though at that time of morning it was only half full, the cafe, and by now the baristas knew my name. The shop uses custom cup sleeves that one of the baristas makes in the corner when she has free time, pressing rubber stamp to blanks—this gives each sleeve a custom, handmade feel. The rubber stamp, when depressed, emits a faint pop. It is very DIY. The morning rush swells and deflates. Pop, pop, pop, goes the stamp. Once I received a cup with a sleeve whose logo had been stamped upside down, and when I mentioned it to the barista on staff we laughed and said it had meant that I would have to drink the cup upside down, though I did not actually turn the cup upside down.

The rest of the day was less pleasant, and in the four hours or so before the caffeine left my system, before my stomach cramped horribly in want of more coffee, which I would not give it because I needed sleep, I managed to read a good portion of a novel I had been picking through uselessly over the previous week. In it two college-aged men who had known each other since they were children begin hiding secrets from each other, and as their respective prides drive a wedge between them, they start unknowingly seeing the same woman—a high school student from a neighboring town who has come to the city to study at their college in an accelerated program in mathematics. The author spends many pages describing how plain the girl is, and how each man comes up with his own dense justification for why this improves the intimacy of the relationship. Besides a rather drab style it was a smart novel, no longer than it needed to have been, and it boldly jumped forward years for its final section, when one of the students had gone to live up north, having inherited a farm from his late mother, lacking the nerves to remain in the city, enmired in routine, deeply tanned, quiet, while the other student, who eloped with the girl, was now deep inside their loveless marriage and spends nights writing a novel lazily glossing their increasingly cruel fights with one another—criticizing that they have both grown fat, blaming her for having lost two children, bemoaning that his mother had died in severe debt. The book disappointingly ended with a flashback to the students in mid-adolescence, talking together in the schoolyard about the evil of women, about the changes they could feel starting in their bodies, about the endless volume their lungs seemed to hold as they raced back up the hill toward class.

In the evening I watched old newscasts on Youtube, listening to careful announcers discuss landslides and mine collapses and the imminent threat of recurrent medium-sized earthquakes, which are the silent destabilizer of homes and a long game. I let their voices touch my scalp and the nape of my neck, and because I was exhausted I didn't turn off the lamp on my bedside table. I dreamed of what it would mean to know mathematics intimately, and whether everything I had been led to believe about its cold clarity would be a boon to the relationships in the life of the practicing mathematician, or alternatively a grave mistake. But when I awoke any conclusion I may have computed was gone.