What came first was a total failure of my ability to understand what I was looking at.

I stood in my own bathroom holding a mug of tea and read that little plastic window the way you read a word in a language you half know, over and over, waiting for it to resolve into something that made sense.

Then I checked the instructions, which I had not needed in six years.

Then I sat down on the lid of the toilet and put the mug on the floor and said, out loud, to nobody: “That’s two.”

I did not shout for him.