If you’re reading this because you are, or were, the net—if you are tired in a way that naps cannot touch—here is permission you do not need from a stranger who learned it anyway: You can take the net down. You can fold it and use it as a blanket for your own cold legs. You can sleep. You can wake up. You can build a table with sharp edges and sturdy joints and invite only people who understand that a table is for holding plates, not the weight of a whole ungrateful world. And when the people you love ask you to prove that you love them by bleeding, you can point at your hands—clean, strong, splintered in the places honest work leaves marks—and say, kindly, “No.”
The world will keep spinning anyhow. The river will keep pretending to be steel in winter and forgiveness in spring. The pigeons will keep making terrible decisions on elegant statues. Somewhere a girl will learn that APR is not a friend and a boy will learn that apologies without commas change the shape of a day. Somewhere a woman will learn to write her name on a deed and on a life and mean it.
Somewhere a brother will learn to buy rice, one bag at a time.
