August involved a dead yoga studio, two broken badge reels, a cancelled DMV appointment, several unnecessary coffees, and enough driving to suggest that I had finally become an American.

By August, New Jersey had stopped feeling like a place I had recently returned to and started feeling like somewhere I actually lived again.

This was encouraging, although it came with consequences.

Time had resumed its alarming speed. Monday appeared, then Friday appeared, and in between I apparently went to work several times. If this continued, I suspected that I would eventually wake up at eighty with only a vague memory of meetings and lunch.

The company cafeteria, fortunately, was excellent.

One takes stability where one can find it.

The first recognizable sign of normal life was yoga.

I started going again with the enthusiasm of someone hoping to reverse several months of physical neglect through concentrated optimism. My favorite studio was BambooMoves in Englewood, which I had once described to a friend as my secret yoga place.

She informed me that people came from Manhattan to take classes there.

So much for secrecy.

The instructors were unusually precise. They could explain one small adjustment in a pose and immediately reveal that I had spent years performing an entirely different activity.

There is something almost offensive about people who understand a subject well enough to make it simple.

Then Google Maps said the studio was closed.

First temporarily.

Then permanently.

Then it disappeared altogether.

A yoga studio, I learned, can die in stages.

I moved on to Pure Bliss Yoga, which had apparently spent my time in Michigan pursuing expansion. The once-quiet studio now had more teachers, more students, and another location. The Edgewater branch also had a view of Manhattan, which meant I could strain a hamstring while looking at the Empire State Building.

Romance comes in many forms.

The larger problem was logistics. To relax through yoga, I had to drive to yoga, park for yoga, perform yoga, and drive home from yoga.

This seemed like an elaborate support system for breathing.

Still, I went.

Afterward, I frequently stopped at PlantShed Café, thus establishing a dependable exercise program:

Yoga: minus fifty calories.

Dessert: plus two hundred.

PlantShed had been part of my Englewood routine long before I left New Jersey. The first time I went in, I did not even know it was a café. I saw plants and entered because I wanted to smell soil after yoga.

I am not someone who reads signs before entering buildings.

Inside, there was the sound of coffee beans grinding, bread, leaves, dirt, coffee—the entire olfactory department of a pleasant Sunday afternoon.

I sat down to write in my notebook.

Then a yellow flower entered my field of vision.

My first thought was essentially, No, thank you.

An elderly woman with white hair was holding out a rose.

A moment later she went to the flower display, gathered an armful, and began giving roses to everyone in the café.

Adults.

Children.

People walking outside.

Dogs.

Within minutes, a quiet café became a room full of newly conversational strangers. Someone told her she had made it the best Sunday ever. A little girl walked around clutching her flower like the lead in an unusually low-budget fairy tale.

I later learned that the woman owned the shop.

This explained the wholesale access to roses.

It did not explain the impulse to give them away.

Years later, PlantShed still smelled good, the pumpkin bread was excellent, and the cold brew remained considerably stronger than my constitution required. I kept adding ice until the coffee had been demoted to something closer to barley tea.

The plants were also suspiciously healthy.

Their leaves were glossy enough to suggest wealth.

These were not ordinary plants. These plants had dermatologists.

I had been thinking about buying something green for my office, but office vegetation should possess more practical qualifications: drought resistance, emotional independence, a willingness to survive neglect.

The glamorous plants could stay home.

The month also included my first proper social plan since moving back: lunch with a former coworker.

She spoke five sentences.

I spoke twenty.

We ate croffles cut into an unreasonable number of pieces and agreed to meet again.

She did not reply.

I remain available.

By the second week, routines were beginning to repeat themselves, which I considered progress.

Naturally, this was when I broke my company badge reel.

I had developed the habit of pulling the retractable cord out and letting it snap back whenever my hands were idle. Eventually the mechanism objected.

A coworker kindly found me a replacement.

I then decided I could repair the original.

To better understand the mechanism, I dismantled the functioning replacement.

I broke that one, too.

This is one of the less celebrated forms of curiosity.

I had confidently told several people that I would fix everything over the weekend. By Monday I had two broken badge holders, loose wire, black string, and no meaningful understanding of mechanical engineering.

The revised plan involved tape.

Fortunately, I had covered my badge with cute stickers, which I hoped would divert attention from the structural collapse.

Badminton went better.

Returning to the court, seeing familiar faces, and driving thirty minutes for something I actually wanted to do made New Jersey feel recognizable again.

The house had changed.

The car had changed.

The job had changed.

But there were still places where an old version of my life had apparently been waiting.

Then came the DMV.

I had a Friday appointment in Jersey City to change my license plate.

The appointment was cancelled.

Of course it was.

New Jersey bureaucracy and I had resumed our relationship exactly where we left off.

Since I was already nearby, I drove to Hoboken instead.

This is one of the great regional advantages of living here: administrative failure can often be converted into pizza.

I ate a slice roughly the size of my upper body, visited a bookstore, and bought five books for twenty dollars.

Books are useful because they can be read.

They can also support bowls of ramen.

I have experience with both applications.

The strange thing was that, even with a car, I had returned to many of the same places I used to visit by train.

Greater mobility had not made me more original.

It had simply improved the departure schedule.

Later in the month, however, the car finally justified itself.

I drove out to Milford, Pennsylvania, a town where I had once lived, leaving around five in the morning and arriving while fog still covered the roads. It took about an hour and twenty minutes, and for the first time I fully understood the peculiar freedom of being able to decide that an old town should become Saturday’s destination and simply drive there.

Naturally, the drive became a private karaoke session.

By arrival, I required coffee for both fatigue and vocal recovery.

An old café I remembered as a casual place for talking had become prettier and more polished—less neighborhood hangout, more unofficial writers’ room. I had coffee, two pieces of bread, and the pleasing sensation that a town can change just enough to make nostalgia feel productive rather than depressing.

I stopped at the library where I had once tutored students, attempted a Rubik’s Cube, discovered that one of the stickers was apparently wrong, and abandoned the project before it could become a matter of principle.

The library was also selling used books for two or three dollars.

More ramen coasters.

Then I wandered downtown.

Milford has the peculiar charm of a place where even public buildings seem slightly domestic. The police station looks like someone could reasonably invite you inside for tea. I passed galleries and places attached to memories I had not thought about in years.

After a second coffee and some pizza—my diet during recreational travel increasingly resembled that of a teenage boy—I finally entered Grey Towers.

I had passed it several times because the name sounded like the sort of historic attraction one visits mainly out of civic duty.

This was a mistake.

The grounds were almost offensively pleasant: enormous trees, carefully placed flowers, beautiful architecture, enough visitors that the place did not feel abandoned, and enough space that none of them mattered.

I immediately wanted to know who had been wealthy enough to live like this and then inconsiderately die.

At this point a reasonable person would have gone back to the Airbnb.

I had consumed two coffees.

I had been driving since dawn.

I had walked around town.

Instead, I went to Bushkill Falls.

Apparently badminton and yoga had given me either improved stamina or poor judgment.

I chose the shortest trail, which still delivered an excellent waterfall with very little moral development required.

The next morning I had brunch near the Poconos at a restaurant whose exterior looked ordinary and whose interior contained chandeliers dramatic enough to make me feel underdressed for breakfast.

One of the dishes was called Baby Jesus.

The establishment was not committed to understatement.

I stopped at a local event, bought small decorations and gifts, ate halal food on the drive back, and somehow arrived home before seven—early enough to complete laundry before the nine-o’clock cutoff.

This may have been the weekend’s greatest logistical achievement.

By the end of August, I had done considerably more than I thought I had.

Yoga studio: gone.

Replacement yoga studio: thriving.

Badge holders: destroyed.

DMV appointment: cancelled.

Badminton: restored.

Hoboken: still there.

Pennsylvania: conveniently adjacent.

Laundry: completed.

I had spent much of the month thinking I was still trying to get my life organized.

Possibly this was the organized version.

There were calendars, commutes, appointments, exercise classes, coffee stops, weekend drives, people to see, things to break, things to replace, and an alarming amount of pizza.

Nothing was especially elegant.

Most things worked.

That would have to do.