One week later...

Feels like I've been out of commission since the quarter started, and I'm still not fully recovered from the million bugs in my tummy and million swirling thoughts (constantly) in my head, and day after day further buried under the pile of clothes and school books that grows when productivity gives way to illness.

Last weekend, in a Sunday afternoon reprieve from the sourest stomach, Pup and I squeezed in a bike ride and visit to the Santa Cruz Fungus Fair, and for the past serendipitously rainy and cool week we've been hyper-aware of the mushrooms growing out of every crevice of our wooded campus, and identifying with our best guesses.

But really, we've stuck around our apartment wrapped in blankets and swallowing down scratchy throats and watching documentaries about drag queens, excursing only for class or work or for medicine or sudden insatiable cravings or when a social outing fallen through turns our warm apartment suddenly too stuffy.

There are many things that endear me to Santa Cruz; I was so happy to roam a small and musty room with hundreds of locals just as fungi-fascinated as me. But at the same time, Pup and I still struggle to find a place to root and grow, our own branching network underground connecting us to thousands of new and interesting individuals, to find beauty and life sprouting from the dead material of the forest floor.