What broke and what didn't

June feels like the right time to look back at February. I don’t know why — maybe it’s the distance, or the fact that the apartment is warm now in the way that only makes sense after you spent three weeks not sure it ever would be again. The heating system. A landlord who took forever to call back. Jake and I in this space, negotiating the cold in every possible way: extra blankets, the oven running longer than it should, one of us always slightly annoyed and neither of us saying it cleanly.

What broke and what didn’t

Here’s the thing I keep landing on: we didn’t fight. Not really. We had friction — there were two days where I was short with him and he went very quiet in the way that means he’s processing something — but we didn’t actually fall apart over it. And I think that matters more than I gave it credit for at the time. When something in your shared life stops working, you find out pretty fast whether you problem-solve together or just parallel-stress beside each other. Turns out we problem-solve. Not perfectly. But together.

Still on this couch. Still thinking.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, mostly because I’m in the middle of the archive project and every family document I touch is really just a record of how people held things together under pressure. Abuela Rosa’s recipes written on the backs of envelopes. Margaret’s late husband organizing a whole art collection by memory before it could be properly catalogued. Everyone finding their own improvised system when the official one fails. Maybe that’s just what domestic life is — a long series of things that temporarily break, and the accumulated evidence of how you two handled it. We handled it. The heat came back. I made sourdough to celebrate and it was, honestly, still not great. But that’s a different post.