“Hey Ref! You’re making calls out of your aaass!” the father of a nine-year-old kid in a game I was officiating yelled at me at the top of his lungs, adding a two-handed, open-palm slam against the glass for emphasis.

Handing off the puck to my officiating partner, I skated to my designated position, which happened to be a spot on the ice fairly close to where that parent stood, still pressed against the glass. Slowly, deliberately, I leaned forward with my hands on my knees, focusing on the impending puck-drop—and giving that parent a good look at the region from which my calls were coming.

I donned an orange safety vest and sparkling new hard hat fresh from its cellophane wrapper and trudged up the wide, steep incline under a blazing California sky. My gait was off-kilter, too much weight in the front of my steel-toed boots. The Sony camera slung across my body hit my back every step I took, like a stranger trying to get my attention. I shoved my small notebook and pen into my jeans back pocket and swung the camera around, securing it with my right hand. Up and up the bridge deck I climbed, all the way to the end, halfway across the San Francisco Bay.

Two years into teaching English in Barcelona I have this feeling of doom. It’s a hollowness in my stomach, a black hole sucking everything in. It's too late to leave but too late to stay. Time grinds to a halt. I no longer understand anything; at the event horizon, the rules no longer apply. We fly back from a short summer vacation in Prague and the plane circles the city, round and round, waiting to land, and I look down and I recognize every landmark, and I see all of my neighborhoods, and can only think, why? Why come back? I don't belong here.

It was a Sunday in September and I was nursing one of the worst hangovers I’d had since college. Hours of restless sleep, lying completely still on my back in the dark, choking down stale crackers only to lose them again a few moments later; this became the day’s very unwelcome routine.

Standing in front of the woman who ran the camp, I was ashamed. “Sorry,” I said, weeping too hard to stop.

“You caved,” one of my eleven-year old bunkmates hissed as we left her office.

“Jellyfish spine,” another said.