That's hard for me to do.

Heat hangs limply on summer's rusty old hook, and you can feel it in the house, a kind of dead weight slapping against the wall with the turn of an old fan. It's hard to be in this heat, reduced to a kind of human existence defined in its simplest terms: human, existing. Eventually sleep is the only logical option, because what else would you do, and you curl up into the too-small loveseat and wait for the heat of the day to finally dissipate, and it does, just enough to sleep fitfully until a yowling cat wakes you up with restless needle paws.

Gah, the horrible effort it is to pull yourself up from that couch in the morning, even while the air is blessedly cool for now. Your eyelids scratch against your eyes, crusty with the allergies aggravated by the dust kicked up by all the whirling fan blades. Somewhere down the hall your children are sleeping in an icy blast of a room cooled by a window air conditioning unit. Your husband is sleeping on the other couch, a fan pointed directly at his face.

And now work. You go and you try to pull forward and feel some terrible force pulling in the opposite direction, and you spend all day grinding against that force, never really getting anywhere and getting worn out in the process. And then you go home. To that warm, awful house.

It will cost you thousands of dollars to fix this air problem. Dollars you don't have in a home you have trouble with. So you jump into the work and grind away and you never really get anywhere, do you.

Do you.

This has not been a lovely week, not at all. But here you go: Your daughter spontaneously kissed you last night, once on the arm. She never kisses -- despises kisses -- and she kissed you. And she said, "That's hard for me to do," in a small voice. And who cares about any of the rest. Who cares, who cares.