The Inventory of Small Mercies

Some days the mercy is small and you have to look for it. A dog that decides you are worth crossing the road for. The bus that waits. The stranger who says take your time, and means it, in a country not built for taking time. I keep a list because I am the kind of person who forgets, by evening, that the morning was survivable. Item: the way the light came through the one clean window. Item: that no one, today, asked me how I was really doing, which was itself a mercy, because I did not have the answer folded small enough to hand across a counter. Item: I was, at three in the afternoon, for the length of one song in a corner shop, completely and stupidly happy, and did not question it — which is the rarest item, the one I am always losing, the one I write down first.