Yom Kippur is over, the gates of the year swung closed. In the digital roll of my camera, I have pictures of my godchild wearing my corduroy coat for Kol Nidre, snazzily over his royal purple shirt. Its shoulders fit him exactly, but my arms are longer, and I can still pick him up.

I never seem to notice vacations until I'm in them. I am waking up without an alarm and eating soup dumplings and reading my trip books as well as whatever printed material has been left where I can reach it and being shown the first season of Deadloch (2023–), which I am enjoying tremendously as both a black comedy crime procedural chock full of lesbians and a masterclass in the multivalence of profanity. (No one in this house is watching The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (2022–) and the minute I asked selkie correctly figured Celebrimbor as the character whose actor I think about watching it for.) I have been gifted a king-size flannel in a sort of test-pattern plaid which I can treat like half a bathrobe. I ate nearly a bag of mango habanero beef jerky because it was there on the counter. My godchild keeps bonking his head into me like a cat. I am slightly overpeopled and having a wonderful time.

I had not been inside a synagogue for the High Holidays in nearly twenty years. Re-reading Peter S. Beagle's Tamsin (1999) for the first time in possibly as long, I keep catching all the technological similes for the interpenetrations of time that give rise to hauntings, slides in a projector, a tape running down, the flickering of a movie run in reverse. I haven't seen the eight-hundred-century comet, but I'm glad it's out there.