The alarm sounded and Lisa’s hand shot out of bed to silence it. Why, she pondered, did people use the snooze button? An ex had argued about this, at some length, in fact more than one ex. The shower was hot and acoustically kind. Downstairs she made toast and coffee, black, the stronger the better. This was the cause of another disagreement. But, honestly, how was she to know other people didn’t take it that way?

She wrote her Morning Pages. There were now over 100 notebooks stacked on her shelves, containing streams of consciousness. This also seemed to be a major topic for discussion.