We had gone to the farmer’s market, inspired to cook more. The tomatoes were bright and just on the precipice of overripeness, the sorrel was novel, verdant, and standing at attention. The salad was coming together nicely, but I saw the carrots sitting there, banded together with their stems wilting more every moment. I chose the one that had spit into two roots, appearing like a pair of trousers. I grabbed it by the legs and cracked them apart easily. To get the necessary delicacy to match the rest of the nuanced salad, I decided to use the mandolin slicer.

I began with vigor, as I have 50 times before. I thought about how I needed to be careful and light with my pressure, how sharp the blade was, and how I needed to start slowing soon as I neared my hand. At the instant those thoughts were floating past, something went awry. The carrot had sidestepped the blade, leaving my thumb to take its place. For a moment, I wondered if I had imagined it. I waited to see if pain would come. It did. I looked with curiosity: it’s probably just a little surface nick. And for a moment, it looked like a superficial abrasion of the clearish layer of skin.

Then the blood came. Damn you, Trousers. My hand was wet, so I wondered if it wasn’t as bad as it looked. Waves of nausea began to expand outward from my stomach as I ran upstairs toward the bathroom. The blood was becoming thicker and more plentiful and inversely proportional to my remaining ability to see. A little cold sweat, my body ringing like a tuning fork. I laid on the white tile floor, babying my dizziness and covering my eyes, until my husband came up to be rational.

It’s a pretty small wound compared to my entire surface area. But, it’s on my right thumb. It’s on the half of the thumb that would press the space bar or piano keys. Apparently my right thumb has been doing all of the space bar pressing in my life. My left hand is quite confused about how to do it. It’s surprising how often there’s a space in writing. I’m not used to noticing. Typing is slow and frustrating, which hasn’t been the case since I was 13, and my 32-year-old brain is probably lamer at learning. But I think it’s a good skill to have, if I can develop it — the left hand space-bar skill. It’s like discovering you have a weak muscle and watching it strengthen. I’m hoping for some satisfaction, as I do with everything that’s a choice.

My thumb is wrapped in a paper towel and climbing tape, the joint cemented straight. It’s a white confection I’m instinctively holding out, hitchhiker-style at all moments. I can’t shower without getting it wet or floss effectively without my thumb’s assistance. (I’m only actually missing being able to do one of those acts. My thumb’s skin flap is more a scapegoat for the other.) Having not showered in a few days, I look a little crazy, like a wild Edelweiss. It doesn’t help my appearance that today is intensely hot, inciting a stripping down to the underpants. Sweatily, pantless, and with fetid breath and armpits, I tick out these words instead of making dinner or conquering the giant pile of dishes mounting in the sink.

This is small potatoes, I know. I could have slipped and fractured my spine or gotten brain damage. But it’s a teeny reminder of how dependent on the physical we humans are. Most of the time, it doesn’t seem like it. It seems more the other way. We have keyboards that capture our huge thoughts with tiny touches. We nearly effortlessly race to however million miles per hour in our Kias or Teslas or airplanes. I’m accustomed to the physical mostly making things easier for the mental. (Most of my what makes my life hard comes from relationships — intangible ill-communication.)

What spurred our farmer’s market outing was watching Cooked, a Netflix series about food hosted by Michael Pollan. In it, there was a scene in India where a goat was brought in, carried sideways by a couple of its little legs, to be slaughtered for lunch. The cooks laid its confused head on a bloodied plate, which indicated the normalcy of this event. The man doing the chopping didn’t change his neutral expression. I looked away for the actual killing, but from what I did see, he removed the goat’s life as though he were washing a dish or tying a shoe.

It takes one banal movement of a man’s arm to dismantle the delicate fabric of the neck, for sentience to pour out on a plate.

My torn thumb, my special opposable digit, presses me gently against my own sentience. Most everything I do, I do with my hands. Most of the time, I think I am what I do unless I’m really paying attention. I’m a writer, or a composer, or a pianist or a baker. My hands take my ideas and communicate them in various ways. Those huge thoughts are shuffled around in these fragile meat pajamas, an extension of our spirit, or the cause of our spirit. Until they stop working.

So often, I am my body without even noticing. I don’t much think of the bones that lever me up hills, or the blood that pumps the right amount of hormone here and there. It is simultaneously extraordinary and disappointingly primitive. How is it that such raw material, lumps of bologna, can be responsible for creating the vastness of human experience? How can this soft, malleable material be our shields?

And yet it works pretty well, unless someone grabs you by the legs around lunchtime. In a moment, no more smelling, or seeing, or hearing. No more worrying. No more baking or painting. Back to molecules and dirt.

We could live anywhere. We can choose to live in any city or town or province where we can afford it.

It feels like a very permanent choice, since Todd and I are looking to buy a place and have a baby, though I know we could manage uprooting again. We’ve had a lot of practice, having moved over a dozen places throughout our fifteen years together.

The place we lived the longest — 5 years — was a tiny apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. That area still feels most like home, probably because we became adults there (as much as we’ll probably ever become adults) and made most of our friends there. But things have changed, and friends have moved on or become something a little different than friends, the figures of friends. They’re like stars that you can barely see because of all the other light in your eyes, and when you do notice them, you’re seeing the memories of them, the light from a while ago. New York may feel like home mostly because of the memory of it being home for so long, but I’m not sure it’s home anymore. Just a twinkly, old galaxy.

We have both rented since we moved out of our parents’ houses, so we’ve never had the experience of a place truly being our own. To have a little spot on this planet where no one will get mad at us for scratching the hardwood, making too many holes in the wall for shelves, or replacing the fixtures, seems an exquisite relief. In the same way that taking long walks in the forest somewhat quiets the anxiety we didn’t know was vibrating in us, I imagine that this freedom will allow the last few internal strings to fully relax, to detune to stillness for the first time ever in our lives.

My piano teacher once told me how she used to have a bathroom entirely made of glass. I imagined it having glass walls encasing the shower and I also pictured it having a frosted glass entrance and several large mirrors. She explained that after learning that her newly born son was mentally handicapped, she took a baseball bat to it all. I don’t remember what she was trying to illustrate with that story, but what stuck with me is how fully she expressed her anger. That the expression was allowed.

I’ve been sitting on a massive pile of anger for a few months, after having a rough time with a new boss. A while ago, I slammed a glass in an almost reflexive attempt to express some of this anger, but as soon as the glass left my hand, I was immediately concerned for the soft floors, where it would leave a big-toe-sized dent. For a fraction of a second it promised catharsis, a full expression of my emotion in that moment with the potential for a contended release at the end. But the onset of insecurity about the floor undermined the power of the gesture. Ultimately, it felt more like pulling out.

I long for a glass bathroom I’m allowed to take a bat to. This would require some sense of security that it’s not a big financial problem to fix it. Getting to the point where we have enough money to make a down payment is a warm and fuzzy feeling, so I’m irrationally confident at the moment, content to imagine only the best possible scenarios such as having enough financial security to break something immediately upon officially owning a structure of our own.

We also have a few other ideas. Todd wanted to build a rooftop garden in our current early-20th century rental, complete with automatic irrigation, but I vetoed this, worried about impending water damage. I’d like to have a more sound-proof recording area, which would involve installing either a premade booth or redoing the century-old windows and adding some expensive padding. This would allow for as much operatic experimentation as my vocal chords could tolerate without the neighbors calling the police either out of frustration or concern. I also like the idea that I could just scream if I felt like it without worrying what people would think.

Not having to think about how I’m going to remove something before I even install it would be a mental relief, part of that tension release I imagine Home-ownership providing. It’s also part of the illusion of permanence. That permanence is something to revolve around, giving us some gravity after being weightless for so long. We’ll just plan to be in that spot, without planning to be anywhere else. It’ll really be Home, where can do whatever the hell we want.