How to Make a Snow Maiden

Over frozen rum-a-ritas in novelty yard glasses, beneath a ceiling crowded with cheeky, neon-painted signs, Kira and Miriam debate what to call the opposite of a babymoon. They’ve been at Señor Frog’s since lunchtime, cycling through umbrella cocktails and orders of jalapeño poppers with queso dip, and the Myrtle Beach daze has settled over them so completely that Kira doesn’t think it’s remotely stupid when Miriam suggests “moonbaby,” and when Kira throws out “adultsun,” Miriam gives it serious, near-scholarly consideration. She repeats the word back to Kira, adultsun, testing its weight in her mouth, and her brow is furrowed, and the center of her tongue is stained this deep purplish blue. The oversize balloon hat a waiter plopped down on her head hours ago has turned her thin blonde hair into a halo of static cling, and Kira thinks her wife has probably never looked so beautiful, not quite so beautiful as she does right now.

The reason for the rebranding of the babymoon, and the intense consideration with which it’s being conducted, is that, well, you can’t have a babymoon without the baby. It’s right there in the name. Miriam told Kira so a thousand times, in a thousand different places, after the adoption agency called with the news. She told her at the library where Kira works, in the hushed tones that libraries demand, and on the train back to Roxbury, where she had to yell to be heard over the clacking of the tracks. Seemed glad for the excuse to yell, to not hold back, actually. In the end, it was those places exactly, and Kira and Miriam’s absolute need to get away from them, that made them decide to go after all. In particular, it was their apartment, where everything had been rearranged, their bed pushed into a corner, their desks crammed in side by side, all so the spare room could be turned into a nursery. Where everything had been assembled and triple-checked for sturdiness. Where whole days had been lost to paint swatch comparisons: moonmist or flaxseed, lemon or dandelion.

That and the plane tickets, booked months ago, turned out to be nonrefundable.

And honestly? The all-inclusive resort? With the lazy river running through the lobby and the front desk attendant who introduced himself as the funcierge? It worked. Because this past week, Boston has felt so far away. So impossibly, necessarily far away that Kira has begun to suspect that Myrtle Beach isn’t just the farthest, spiritually, that you can get from Boston, but that it’s the farthest, spiritually, that you can get from anywhere. And this is maybe the best thing about Myrtle Beach, more than its four-hundred-plus hotels or its sixty miles of shoreline or whatever: its bald refusal to recognize that which lies beyond its limits.

Even now, at Señor Frog’s, on the last day of their trip, as Boston and all that awaits them there threatens to encroach on their good time, Myrtle Beach says: no. Myrtle Beach says: who goes there? Myrtle Beach says happy hour starts in twenty, with half-off appetizers and two-for-one drinks at any of the restaurant’s—count ’em—five bars.

Myrtle Beach says noomybab.

No, Miriam says noomybab. “Because this is all so backwards,” she says, meaning they were so close and now they’re right back where they started. And she knows these things happen sometimes, the agency said these things happen sometimes, the birth mother can decide right up until the very last minute. It’s a risk, they said. It’s all outlined in the contract. A risk but a calculated one. Unlikely but not impossible.

Suddenly, the loudspeaker crackles and, with the practiced enthusiasm of a place open 365 days a year, even during that category-three hurricane, even on Christmas, it announces that it’s officially happy hour. Thanks, Myrtle Beach. Perfect timing.

Really, Myrtle Beach is turning out to be everything they hoped when they picked it over Sedona, over Santa Fe, thinking this was their chance to make up for the classic spring break they both missed out on in college. There’ve been oyster bars and a cappella tribute concerts at the House of Blues, motorcycle rallies and ziplines through the tops of palm trees, that after-dark walking tour where the guide claimed drowned sailors still haunt the employees-only section of the Hard Rock Cafe.

There was, too, the way the salt clung to Miriam’s shoulders after a dip in the ocean, the tiny bikini she bought at one of the dozens of stores on the strip that sold tiny bikinis, just because she thought it was ridiculous, the kind of thing she would never wear back home. And when Kira begged her, later in the hotel room, for a runway show, and Miriam obliged, it was because she wanted Kira to do that cheesy but sweet thing she sometimes does: say her name with the emphasis on the last syllable, drawing it out extra long, like “Miri-yummm.”

Now it’s Sunday. They’ve been to the wax museum three times and the Pirates Voyage dinner show twice, they’re on a first-name basis with the barista at their hotel Starbucks, and at this very moment, karaoke’s in full swing on the second floor of Señor Frog’s.

And aren’t the past and future silly things to think about when one is sitting in a chair with its back molded to look like a butt wearing polka-dot bikini bottoms? Which both Kira and Miriam are. So they don’t.

Think, that is.

What they do is build a frozen cocktail girl.

It’s a joke, mostly. A continuation of the long joke that this whole week has been. Kira watches a waiter in a red apron carry a platter full of cocktails from the bar, and her first thought is: why red? It makes her think of a butcher, or a serial murderer. Her second thought has to do with the towering concoction he sets down on the table next to theirs.

It’s some kind of daiquiri: balls of shaved ice, violently pink, topped with whipped cream and a diced strawberry. And it could be the way the ice is stacked, or the way the strawberry slices, from a certain angle, look almost like a pair of parted lips. Or it could be that these days, one hundred percent, Kira’s got kids on the brain. But something cuts through the stale, sticky haze of their final happy hour in Myrtle Beach. A memory from Kira’s childhood. A story someone once told her.

About the snow maiden, Snegurochka.

When she asks Miriam if she’s heard it, Miriam laughs so hard the table shakes and the little paper umbrella tips sideways out of her glass.

“The one about the old couple who can’t have a baby so they build one out of snow? Kind of like, um, Jack Frost, right?”

Kira’s pretty sure the origins of Snegurochka predate those of Jack Frost, but she’s not going to go all Boston Public Library assistant librarian, Copley Square branch, on Miriam right now. Because right now, there’s a familiar glint in Miriam’s eyes, a spark that’s been her signature since their days together at BU. A spark that Kira worried had gone out the moment the agency called, but that Myrtle Beach, of all places, seems to be rekindling bit by bit.

A spark that Kira knows means mischief.

A spark that you know, you just know, she’s going to fan.

“Sure,” she shrugs, “and it works. More than one way to make a baby.” She doesn’t bring up what happens to Snegurochka in all the stories, and she hopes Miriam never learned the endings.

Miriam stares at her wife for a long minute, using the wooden part of her paper umbrella as a toothpick. Finally, she flashes a coy smile. “Well, it’s faster than filing new paperwork.”

If you’re going to order a dozen tropical drinks and dump their contents onto the table, then start sculpting those contents into the shape of your would-be daughter, the late-afternoon rush at Señor Frog’s is the time and place to do it. Their waiter bounces ping-pong-like between tables, too busy to notice them. There’s a large group in family reunion T-shirts arguing about how many nacho platters to get for the table. There’s a youth volleyball team with a tight-lipped coach trying fervently to track down a low-carb menu. There’s a bachelorette party wearing matching silk sashes and one of them’s leaning over to ask another if she’s sure, absolutely sure, that this is the place where the staff gives lap dances between courses. A group of frat guys stumble onto the stage sing-shouting the opening lines of “Sweet Caroline,” and every time there’s feedback on the mic, a pair of fussy twins in high chairs at the back of the room begin to screech.

In the middle of it all there’s Kira and Miriam, and they’ve set the garnishes off to the side for later, and they’re trying to get the slope of her neck just right. And if anyone notices what they’re up to, or cares, they keep it to themselves. After all, the drinks are paid for and Kira’s tab is open, and really is the mess they’re making any worse than that of the high-chair twins, who at this very moment are finger painting their trays with fat globs of ketchup? Maybe that’s why the red aprons, Kira realizes. That would make sense.

Empty glasses stacked by the legs of their chairs to make room, their girl stretches long and wide across the table’s surface. They build her lying on her back, because they figure building her straight up, snowman-style, would take a whole lot more ice, more frozen drinks than they could reasonably order. More than they should be paying for, even—there’s a reason they’re in Myrtle Beach and not, say, Santorini. So they build her lying down, with one blended-ice arm and one blended-ice leg reaching for Kira’s side of the table, and the other arm and leg reaching toward Miriam. She’s mostly frozen mudslides and Froggy Ritas, with a pour of Bahama Mama on each cheek to give her that fruit-punch flush. Her hair is sections of pineapple rind artfully pieced together, her mouth a thick orange slice, and her eyes two basil leaves, one much bigger than the other. Somewhere around where her ears might be, Miriam drapes a pair of maraschino cherries like dangly earrings.

After working in quiet concentration for half an hour, Kira and Miriam lean back from the table, up to their elbows in simple syrup and blue curaçao, and survey their creation. Her unchanging expression. Her mismatched, iris-less, basil-leaf eyes.

Miriam looks at Kira, and Kira back at Miriam.

Finally, Miriam whispers, “She’s terrifying.”

The two burst out laughing. They take turns yanking napkins from the silver dispenser, starting the hard job of scrubbing the sticky mess from their hands. Balls of used napkins pile high on one corner of the table and litter their laps. But even though Kira makes a joke about how they’re probably too old for this, and Miriam makes a joke about how she can’t believe they’re going to get kicked out of this place before the frat guys, neither of them gets up. And after the last of their embarrassed chuckles die down, both turn their gaze to the frozen girl between them.

Waiting for—what? Waiting for something.

Maybe for the waiter to come back so they can apologize profusely. Offer to clean up, to do the dishes themselves, to leave the kind of tip that says: “We just don’t know what came over us, two self-respecting women who have jobs and a Roomba and who hardly ever, we promise, play with our food.”

Or maybe something else. Maybe waiting for the breeze from the Atlantic to waft in through the windows and rustle one of the basil leaves, just a little, or nudge the orange-slice mouth into a crooked smile.

But the music blares on, and no one pays them any mind. A few tables over, their waiter is explaining to the volleyball coach about the chicken taco salad, how it’s pretty low-carb, he guesses, if you don’t eat the taco part.

And the frozen girl looks as lifeless as ever. Except that, after a while, she does move, in a way.

She melts.

Which is what happens in all the Snegurochka stories, of course. The snow maiden gets hot from skipping through the forest trying to keep up with her new human friends. Or she falls in love with the neighbor boy, a shepherd who warms her ice-cold heart till it’s a puddle on the ground. The old couple mourns their melted daughter for the rest of their lives, which are unmercifully long, and it’s not true what they say about fairy tales, that they all end happily ever after.

It takes a drop of piña colada falling onto Kira’s sandaled foot to get her to tear her eyes from the table. When she looks up at Miriam, she regrets bringing this whole thing up at all.

She can’t tell if her wife’s face is red like it’s been all week, from sunburning over sunburn, then getting a butterfly painted on her cheek at the boardwalk and later scrubbing it raw over the hotel sink, or extra red like it gets when she’s trying hard not to cry.

The frat guys on stage finally take their bows and immediately Kira misses them, in part out of some reflexive New England loyalty to “Sweet Caroline” and in part because she’s come to love the frat guys. Not these frat guys in particular but all of Myrtle Beach’s frat guys in general, and how they represent to her a totally different, totally carefree stage of life.

Her stage of life, and Miriam’s, being the stage where you go back to Boston and tell your family and friends how it all fell through. And you tell work you won’t be needing the maternity leave after all, and you try to decide if the nursery furniture, because it’s been assembled, counts as used or not. And oh, my god, Kira’s going to have to call off the playdates she’s already scheduled with the neighbors. And she’s going to have to tell her mom’s friend, Knows-Everyone Nancy, that they don’t need her to call in that favor about the preschool after all, Kira having gotten way ahead of herself again, like Miriam tells her she always does.

Suddenly the signs on the ceiling—“Boring customers pay double!”, “My reality check bounced!”—don’t feel amusingly cheeky but claustrophobic, the way they loom overhead, shouting in all caps, threatening to tumble down at any moment and take the whole building with them. And the music on the loudspeakers feels not festive but deafening, and the conga line that’s formed in front of the stage fills Kira with dread, looks like it’s coming right for them. Looks too much like an umbilical cord, an IV tube. A snake.

“I’m sorry,” Miriam sniffs, flustered. She pushes the heels of her hands into her eye sockets, knocking her balloon hat slightly askew. “This is stupid. This was just a fun thing. Supposed to be a fun thing. For the vacation highlights reel or whatever. And I’m making it weird. Obviously she’s not going to come alive. Shit.” She waves her hands over the table, the colors in the icy sludge swirling together now, like she’s trying to magic it away. “Not she. It. It.”

Kira chews her bottom lip, folds and unfolds her hands in her lap. Finally, she says quietly, “It’s not stupid, you know.”

Miriam looks up. “What?”

Kira sighs. “It’s just, okay. We kind of half-assed it, is all. Cause technically, if we wanted to do this the right way, we wouldn’t use alcohol, right? Alcohol makes ice melt faster. If the old couple, or the kid who built Jack Frost or whatever, had used snow full of alcohol, no way that would have worked.”

Miriam lifts an eyebrow like she’s wondering at what point during this vacation did she accidentally sign up for chemistry lab, but what she says out loud is, “Sure. I guess that makes sense.”

“And the other thing—” Kira winces. “The other thing is that, well, according to the stories, to make something human, you need something human.”

Miriam nods slowly. “I think I’ve heard this one before. When a man and a woman really love one another…”

Kira rolls her eyes and smiles. “Not like that. I mean, in some of the stories, the couple doesn’t just use snow. At the end, they also put in blood.” She pauses. “And bones.”

Miriam’s eyes go wide.

“Just chickens usually,” Kira explains quickly. “They keep chickens. Or sometimes, I don’t know. Other things. A stray dog or cat. I only remember one story where they go to the graveyard to dig some up.”

Miriam lets out a low whistle. “That’s dark, man. That’s too much.” But over her eyes passes that familiar glint.

Which is how it really is, Kira knows, with fairy tales. They can be dark and happy all at once, or if not happy then at least familiar in a way that feels comfortable. Which is how it’s been in Myrtle Beach too. Happy, generally, more or less, with breezy cabanas and shrimp cocktails and a hotel room with a light-up hot tub right in the middle, like, right there between the balcony and the king-size bed.

But there have been other parts too. Parts that wouldn’t exactly fit in with the sunny snapshots on Myrtle Beach’s tourism website.

Like on Wednesday, when they passed one of those shops that’ll airbrush any design you want onto a T-shirt, and the headless mannequin in the front display was wearing a teeny crop top, and beneath its hem you could see the curve of two breasts, plastic pale and cracking. And Kira made some comment like, “Eesh, that could fit a freakin’ toddler.” And they both fell silent, that word, toddler, rattling around the echo chambers of their minds. They both fell silent and they stayed silent the rest of the way to dinner at Joe’s Crab Shack, then all through dinner, then the rest of the night.

Or on Thursday, when they were supposed to go to the water park and probably piss themselves at the top of Summit Plummet, but Miriam got an emergency call from work, some shipping delay out of Hong Kong, total PR nightmare, so Kira went alone. And the plan was to meet on the strip for a late lunch and shopping, but Kira never showed. Just kept going down this one water slide, not even an especially fun or daredevil one, but this pretty short, pretty straight dark tunnel that started in one big pear-shaped pool and shot out into another. Into still, warm water. Bright, blinding light. Kept climbing up to wait, go down again. Into the bright light, the fresh start. Some new life so different from this one.

Or late Friday, back in their hotel room, when she caught Miriam standing sideways in front of the bathroom mirror with the bottom of her shirt tucked into her bra. She had her shoulders pushed back and her hips out, her palms resting on either side of her stomach. When Kira turned the corner, Miriam quickly pulled her shirt down. “Too much salt at dinner,” she explained, “Food baby,” and she played a little drumbeat on her belly and laughed. And Kira said softly, “Miriam.” And Miriam replied, “Kira.” And Kira said, “Miriam,” and Miriam snapped, “Stop. Jesus Christ. For once, can’t you know when to stop?”

That night, after her wife had gone to sleep, Kira snuck down to the boardwalk to ride the SkyWheel, half-wishing that it would get stuck with her car at the top. More than half-wishing, probably. So she could look out at all the people, all the noisy, sparkly, coconut-scented activity of Myrtle Beach. Pouring out of the bars, into the music venues. People everywhere. So many people. The world was lousy with them. How could anyone want for more?

This is how.

This is how you make a snow maiden.

For real this time.

Take two parts—okay, four garbage bags full of—crushed ice from your hotel floor’s ice machine, plus one part—that’s two orders of—chicken wings from the late-night menu at the bar downstairs. Check with the bartender to make sure they’re not boneless and listen for three minutes to his rant about did you know boneless wings don’t even come from the wings of a chicken, can you believe that, kind of false advertising if you think about it, etcetera. Three minutes, not a second more. Then lug it all down to the beach across the way. It’s after dark so nobody asks questions. You could be anyone, can be anyone in Myrtle Beach: restaurant employees taking out the trash after their shift, or sorority sisters at Coastal Carolina on some sort of initiation task, or volunteers for one of those environmental organizations, shore cleanup or whatever, staying late to finish the job.

That’s in Myrtle Beach, you can be anyone. At home, in Boston, no way. In Boston, starting tomorrow, you’re the couple for whom it didn’t Work Out. You’re the recipients of uneasy glances and sympathy cards. When your sister-in-law gets pregnant, you’re the last to find out, because honestly she was kind of dreading the conversation, honestly she never knows how you’re going to react. Starting tomorrow, you’re the annoying customers at the returns counter at Pottery Barn Kids at Natick Mall.

In Myrtle Beach, though, you can be anyone. And it’s after dark, so nobody asks questions. Still, you look kind of suspicious dragging four garbage bags of crushed ice and a Styrofoam box of chicken wings across one of Myrtle Beach’s busiest streets. So do try to get it all in one trip.

Ice to fill her out. Bones to hold her up. Seaweed, braided, for the hair. Pebble eyes and purple cockleshell ears.

You find a couple of seagull feathers for the lips.

The blood, though, will have to be yours.

Kira works furiously, knees digging trenches into the sand. Something about the absurdity of the mission has sent a surge of adrenaline coursing through her, and it’s cut through the weeklong buzz, leaving her eyes clear and determined. She pulls the ice from the bags in large fistfuls, lays down a foundation, then builds higher and higher. One mound after another. Snowman-style this time. Two feet tall. Three feet, four. Miriam molds as she goes, adding careful details: the stitching in her dress, the barely noticeable bump in the profile of her nose. When they’ve finished, they strip the chicken meat off the bones, and their hands, pink and near numb from the ice, turn slick and orange with Buffalo sauce.

Not speaking, hardly breathing, they press the bones into her arms, her legs, her back—a skeleton to make their daughter strong. To help her stand up straight, walk through life with confidence.

Because it would have been a girl, had the call from the agency never come, Miriam frets extra over the seaweed hair. She drapes it to one side, then the other. Tucks it behind the seashell ears.

Finally, Kira stands and pulls from her back pocket something flat, smooth, and circular: a souvenir pin they picked up at one of the boardwalk gift shops days ago. It’s cheap laminated plastic, not one of those nice enamel ones, already looks a little sun-faded. On the front, there’s a picture of a blue anchor and an orange safety tube with a rope between them, and on the back there’s the silver pin, tucked neatly into its clasp. Kira frees the pin with one hand and raises the other, curling her four fingers into her palm so it appears, to anyone on the shore that night, so innocent—like she’s giving Miriam a thumbs-up.

Then she pushes the sharp point into her skin.

The blood beads quickly to the surface, and in the moonlight it looks not red but black, deep and mesmerizing. It reminds Kira of the squid ink pasta they had earlier that week at Lombardo’s, the way they got all dressed up, how black-hole dark the pasta looked against the white of the tablecloth. And what their waiter told them, about how squids release ink into the water when they feel threatened, when they’re trying to escape, desperate not to fall prey to whatever’s coming fast for them.

She brings her thumb to the maiden’s mouth, and only then does her blood reveal itself as such. When the crushed ice between the seagull feathers turns pink, soaking it all up.

“So that’s everything, huh?” Miriam asks.

“All I can think of,” Kira replies.

They walk the dozen or so feet to the water and wash their hands in the cold Atlantic. The saltwater stings the pinprick on Kira’s thumb and she thinks that it feels right actually, finally, to have some of the hurt made physical. This concentrated wound, short-lived and simple. If you can point to it, it’s easier to explain.

They sit cross-legged together in front of the maiden, far enough away that they can see the whole of her, but close enough that, when they squint, they can just make out the freckles scattered across her cheeks. These Miriam added at the last minute with the souvenir pin, after wiping the blood off the metal tip. They watch the maiden sometimes, and other times they watch the ocean lap the shore behind her, on its way to low tide.

Eventually, Miriam breaks the silence. “What should we name her?”

Kira leans her head against her wife’s shoulder. “You know, a wise woman once told me to quit getting so ahead of myself.”

Miriam laughs. Her thin blonde hair is tangled and clumped together with sweat and sand, and it clings to her forehead and the sides of her face, and on the bridge of her nose there’s a stripe of wing sauce that she must not realize is there. And Kira thinks she was wrong earlier, dead wrong, about Miriam in that stupid balloon hat at Señor Frog’s. Because however beautiful her wife looked then, it was nothing compared to how she looks right now.

The maiden they built? She, too, looks beautiful. But it’s the same perfectly still, stiff kind of beautiful, no matter how long they sit there. No matter how long they wait, as the golden squares of the hotel rooms behind them gradually go out.

And maybe it’s the booze starting to wear off, but Kira realizes that while it was absolutely quiet the whole time they were building, suddenly the sounds of Myrtle Beach have returned, are rushing to fill the space around them. Inoffensive rock pulsing from one of the few venues on the strip still open. Fliers distributed by club promoters earlier that evening, now fluttering wildly against trash cans and street lights. The waves rolling softly in and out, in and out, like the world is awake and breathing, and a group of good-looking coeds farther down the shore, loudly discussing the difference between alligators and crocodiles.

Kira puts her hands on her knees to steady herself, then pushes herself up to standing. “All right, I officially have Myrtle Beach brain. Time to go home?” She holds a hand out to Miriam, who takes one last look at the maiden.

“What’ll happen to her?”

Kira bites her lip. “The sun, or the tide. Whichever comes first.” She’s always hated the ending.

The maiden’s eyes are wet, but of course they are—that’s to be expected of a girl made of ice and left outside in eighty-percent humidity. It’s nothing more than that, Kira knows. If you wiped her tears with your thumb, if you held your thumb to your tongue, you wouldn’t taste salt. You wouldn’t taste anything.

Miriam sits there long enough that Kira wonders if she heard her. Then she nods and lets Kira pull her up from the sand.

As they walk away, the alligators-versus-crocodiles people reach the maiden and they’ve almost figured it out. It’s something to do with the snout or the teeth or the jawline, or where they live, or how they stalk their kills. Is one greener than the other? What’s the one in Peter Pan? But the maiden stops them in their tracks—a spectacular sight in a city that prides itself on its spectacles—and they tap one another on the shoulder, and they fall to a hush and point. A couple of them laugh, like What on earth, like Only in Myrtle Beach, and a couple others circle her, examining her ersatz buttons, her slimy hair.

Then one pulls a camera out of their bag and snaps.

The camera’s flash cuts through the night and a glint passes across the maiden’s eyes, two ocean-smoothed pebbles shaped vaguely like almonds. A glint passes across them, then disappears.

Kira and Miriam disappear, too—from Myrtle Beach, that is, and when their flight touches down at Boston Logan it’s snowing. They stop keeping time by happy hours and tides, they put the apartment back to normal, their tans fade, and they finally manage to stomach a wine spritzer again, in that order. Miriam’s turning her ridiculous tiny bikini into a dishcloth—so at least it can be useful—when Kira finds the postcard in their stack of mail.

It’s from the barista at the hotel Starbucks, the one with whom they were on a first-name basis. Her name tag said Assistant Manager, but she said they could call her Jen.

Jen’s postcard says she misses her party girls, is so glad they exchanged information because, would they believe it, she’ll be starting school in Boston in the fall. And she’d love to get together. Or they could come back to Myrtle Beach sooner. There’s always something worth seeing in Myrtle Beach. Like, get a load of this newest “point of interest,” the postcard says. Popped up overnight not long ago and already it’s the talk of the town.

Kira flips the postcard over and yelps. Miriam looks up from her bikini project, eyebrow raised.

On the front is a picture of the maiden, standing right where they left her. It’s daylight: blue sky, white sand, blue water. The picture must have been taken after they left. But Kira didn’t figure the ice would last the night. How could she still be intact—Kira’s eyes flick to the date in the corner—three weeks later?

She looks the same, down to the very last freckle, though somehow taller, and her pebble eyes give off a peculiar shine. There’s something about it that Kira recognizes. It reminds her of the spark that shows up in Miriam’s eyes sometimes, when her wife’s in the mood for mischief. When she feels like getting up to something, and the world seems immense and rich with possibility. When she knows it’s all hers for the taking, and she’s thinking it feels good, so good, to be alive.