I... I don't know if this is the right place but I feel like I need to say it to someone who isn't a bill collector or my niece. I've been running the shop for forty-one years now. It started as a way to fund my sculpting, a way to keep my hands in something malleable when the clay wouldn't sell, but the business side of it—the *practicality* of survival—it just sort of swallowed the art whole. Now I’m seventy-eight and the only things I’m shaping are sourdough boules and those tiny, delicate petit fours. My chest feels so tight tonight. It’s just the flour, I tell myself. I think maybe I’ve developed a bit of what they call *occupational asthma* or maybe a localized allergic reaction to the rye dust. It’s quite common in the medical literature. When I’m in the kitchen, it’s like a white veil is over everything. It’s beautiful in a way, the way the light hits the dust motes at 5am. But then the coughing starts. It’s a dry, hacking thing that makes my ribs ache for hours. My niece, she came in last Tuesday and she looked so worried, she said “Auntie, you’re blue around the lips,” and I just laughed and told her I’d been sampling the blueberry glaze. A lie. A silly, small lie because I can't afford for it to be anything else. If I stop, the shop stops. And if the shop stops... well, I haven't exactly been *fiscally responsble* with my savings. I spent too much on fine chisels and Italian marble back in the seventies when I thought I was going to be the next Hepworth. I think I’m experiencing some kind of *somatic displacement*. I tell myself it’s the oven heat or the humidity, but even now, sitting in my armchair at 2am with the windows open and the cold air coming in, my lungs feel like they’re made of lead. I can’t quite catch the tail end of a breath. It’s like trying to draw a line with a charcoal pencil that’s always breaking at the tip.