Have all of the other days been not good?

In the morning, I dress while Russell reclines in bed with coffee and a novel. My hair blow-dried straight for the first time in months. Silver earring flashing in the morning light. I pull on a soft top, a feminine dusty desert rose colour. He glances up at me. I look at him. His face has a softness, his eyes liquid.

“You’re so pretty,” he says.

I cycle home alongside the ocean. Daffodils blooming in an improbable spray of yellow. February on the coast.

At home, my work phone is ringing. I answer. My friend Lindsay from the Kamloops office. We talk about this and that, and I am comforted by seeing her face there on the computer screen. The video calls are not all bad, not when you love the other person. She offers me an opportunity to get involved in a team doing work in the Yukon. My heart blossoms, and I feel a lightness and excitement that I haven’t felt in months. Excitement about the future. The wild, wide open subarctic landscape. Unfathomably large mountains; great heaps of the continent folded over upon itself. Short tundra plants quivering in a steady, endless wind. The Yukon.

I say yes.

Later in the morning, I meet with a new counsellor. I nervously await her to join the video conference, tucking my hair behind my ear and then untucking it. She arrives, and I immediately like her presence. I can be myself around her. She feels safe.

At the end of the call, my insides have unclenched. How long have I been holding onto this? Onto everything.

I talk on the phone with Robyn, my first time hearing her voice since last summer. Her voice fills me up to the brim. I love her like a sister. I’m so glad that she’s still in my life.

There are other good parts of the day, the everyday good things. Cycling to the climbing gym. Hanging from the rope and the chalk on my hands and seeing other people and solving climbing problems until my hands are burning and skin peels from my callouses. Cycling home in the cold, arctic outflow, snow on the horizon. Dinner by candlelight and reading on the couch and falling asleep next to him, his arm around me, as it is most every night.

I’d almost forgotten about being happy.

I’d almost forgotten about love.