I lose him in Kroger to fits and fury and drift aisle by aisle calling his name. I’m someone who can’t keep track of his own things. Between med-spa blue pallets of purified water, I lose this haunted house of a shopping list, too, and beetle about for all the dairy in the world to see. The nameless neighbors and pock-marked stock boys with inventory guns, goblin-like and perched atop of endcaps where bread is on sale because a wasteful baker got carried away with the yeast and water, flour and salt – their looks bounce off me like basketballs on fiberglass, but they are there, full of silent comments and screeching violin speech, how they’d never and how there’s no control.

There’s a dinner to make that he will, in all likelihood, not eat tonight, but we have to go home and get the not eating started because there’s still the tyranny of bedtime after that. Even as I run panicked (what about sex traffickers?), I rolodex through his favorite foods as of last week: eggs, scrambled not fried, bagels with butter, mashed sweet potatoes, Velveeta grilled cheese, plain spaghetti, Frosted Flakes that were grrrrrreattt last Tuesday but may not be tomorrow.

When I find him in haircare and skin treatments, I lift him, carry him away screaming and rigored with a bowed-out spine because I am strong like an archer.

In other ways I am not.

For instance, in the car, I collapse and shutter my eyes, then snap them back open to read on the sun visor how DEATH AND SERIOUS INJURY CAN OCCUR. I pray in sighs and groans how today we’ve found new ways of not dying. How he and I, we’re okay. He, exhausted, unrigored, folded and puffy, soft and creamy and needing me. I must teach him to be in control of his body, something that once belonged to someone else but is now completely his. Halleluiah and damn. What am I supposed to do about that?