This is Emily Writes Back, a newsletter to cheer you, by cartoonist, poet, writer, and community radio host Emily Sanders Hopkins.
Edward Bliss Foote, Plain Home Talk About the Human System—the Habits of Men and Women—the Cause and Prevention of Disease—Our Sexual Relations and Social Natures (New York: Murray Hill, 1896), via Public Domain Review
Doctor's Note (what I wrote my doctor instead of going to the gym this morning) In times like these, we all could use some help, a prescription for our hearts and nerves, even if we own a boat. And so I suggest the following, dear Doc: Don’t let him be the one person who has managed to utterly ruin your life and all life. Don't look upon anything else in rows or columns stacked. Eschew all rectangles not formed by the hand of God (goat pupils, alligator hides, and rocks). Do not say you can't believe it nor ask how this happened. Lie on a 37-foot sailboat on a warm evening in September while your friends jump over the railings into the cold, bug-covered lake that's dark as coke to tread and talk. As they kick, look up into the clay slurry 5 o'clock sky and breathe it in, the parts not drawn over with mast and lines, sail's thin bones, ruler'd onto blurry clouds by ballpoint pen, one tattered American flag lamely flapping. When a storm kicks up, wind darkens sky, your friends should hoist themselves back onboard by ladder and dry their hair with towels even as it starts to rain, and you should climb the mast like it's a tree and you're a practiced native, higher and higher yet as wind beats the puny flag and pulls the warmth away. Let go your knees, uncross your ankles, let the wind tear your legs out straight while your hands cramp against the mast. You'll be a human flag flying, a gymnast's trick, a scare, a sight. People on other boats will batten down their hatches against the downpour and take video for social through portholes of the Amazing Flying Physician defying gravity and tyranny and weather. You can do it, if only for a moment, and that will be enough. Call me in the morning.* *Patient makes hand gesture indicating a phone call.