Maggie is really leaving. It’s not fake. She most likely will not come back to the house so we are not bound to her until death. It feels different to live like this, like Maggie isn’t clinging to my back until I stagger into my grave, dead. As a doornail.

Death is on my mind. Maybe you’ve noticed. It might be due to Daisy leaving for college in 13 days. In my waking brain she is just driving me crazy with her cluelessness, like when she explained to me Biden’s presidency or her theory of Lauryn Hill, who she didn’t listen to. I am ready for her to explain those concepts to another person, not myself.

But, the more I think about it, the more I realize we are all freaking out. She is driving me crazy and I am terrified. I can do hard things at the same time!

The other thing is that I’m starting to lose the thread of Maggie’s social media posts. In my defense, she has been swapping her stories around a lot as she adjusts to this massive new plot point in her personal narrative: the divorce. She did not want a divorce, and a few times I have felt her try to assign Calvin and me the identities of her and her Ex.

Lately Calvin has been characterized as a failed musician, a stretch since Calvin took a year of drum lessons and that was it. I am, as the email from last week revealed, insanely jealous of her. So Calvin is the Ex and I am her, and we continue to be her enemies. She said that we stole a Paul McCartney artifact from her.

And Maggie tweeted that he beat her with a bat at his managers. That’s actually the worst thing she’s done, and probably why I’m upset/not upset. We are all very tender people and we just don’t need to be stalked so specifically. It’s distressing, and then it leads me into a place of, I need to write about this, this wild feeling of being targeted so randomly, so stupidly. Or is that just life?

Okay, she’s still got me.