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There was this television show called Nature. One episode showed a man raising a bear cub to a juvenile bear. When it came time to release the bear into the wild, the man set a weak bear trap, designed to hurt, but not critically injure. He called to this bear, who loved him like a parent. He called him into the trap. The betrayal hurt to watch. He was teaching bear his final lesson – do not trust me or anyone like me.

I remember telling Tim something like that when he was around 20 years old and I was twenty-five. I felt like he had been depending on me too much, and I had to establish a boundary. So I fired him and repossessed the XBOX which we shared, but which I had paid for. It was a dick move.

Mrs Wilson’s daycare was run out of the first floor of her house. I shit my pants during nap time every day for about a year. I wonder what they were feeding us. She had a garden out back and took us on field trips often. One day we went to the ocean and gathered seaweed. We brought it back to her kitchen and made “Indian Pudding.”

I saw my first salamander on one of our walks in the forest she took us on. It was a tiny reddish brown creature who lived under the leaves under a rock. He was soft and gentle and he moved languorously as though in a dream.