Vivacious?

Kelsey Breseman
4 min readSep 20, 2024
A horizontal woman cuddles a sleeping King Charles cavalier spaniel
Photo by Robert Walker

Crossword puzzles have their own syntax: the tense of a verb or the plurality of the clue must match. Quotes stand in for another way to express the sentiment. And the use of a question mark denotes literality: don’t take this hint in its usual sense.

After a few months of playing the New York Times games every day, Robert and I finally subscribed. He made us a joint email, so he can start the day's harder puzzles on the morning commute, I can take a turn in the morning, he plays at lunch hour, and so on until we finish them together in the evening.

Thus, I now spend a lot more time solving crosswords. I'm "vivacious?": full of life. Not lively. The life is taking up space, tweaking around, strumming my organs like instrument strings. It's a lot of weight to slide side to side if I roll over. It's feeling like a baby.

Wild as it is to grow a human from scratch, it feels wilder now that there's a whole creature inside me.

My intestines move, and it has nothing to do with me. One of the books describes the sensation of C-section as "someone doing the washing up inside you," but it kind of feels like that already. And though the fetus is tracking exactly average growth, I feel sure it's going to come out huge. Neither parent is small, and it's got our energy already.

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Kelsey Breseman
Kelsey Breseman

Written by Kelsey Breseman

An adventurer, engineer, indigenous Alaskan writing the nitty gritty. See my recent posts for free on Substack: https://ifoundtheme.substack.com/

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