Mercury oozes like lava only faster ‒ it’s quicksilver. It can beat like a human heart when exposed to certain elements. Somehow I made yours beat and you lathered me in your beautiful ooze. You are irrepressible, irresistible but also capricious. In the blink of an eye you can become volatile. Your ooze turns into lava that razes the places you’ve touched. I am burnt. Then just as quickly you turn to liquid gold, slowing down, passionately covering me with the precious metal that you are. I am subdued and become glued to you, until you change once again into poison.

I always wanted to make things grow. Wherever I lived houseplants thrived; cuttings sprouted leaves, Bonsais grew new branches, cacti bloomed. Colorful cut flowers in pretty vases always graced my table. I’d place the fallen blossoms in little bowls of water to let them live a while longer. When I finally had my own garden, I planted vegetables and berry bushes and thrilled at the bountiful yield of tomatoes, peppers, strawberries and more.

This year the trees and shrubs on my deck have betrayed me by dying. As for the white-spider-laced houseplants? I want to murder all the needy bastards.

Looking at him you could not see a less extraordinary man. A head that is oddly large for his small stature, one that seems to contain more than it could possibly hold and a heart that matches it. You can always find him in a room full of much taller people by simply following the sound of laughter. He possesses an uncanny self-assurance that enables him to approach and engage even the most daunting characters and once engaged, you would be hard-pressed to ignore him. I married him because he made me laugh. I have been laughing for 40 years.

The year began with frequent panicked calls, multiple falls and nightmarish nights in the ER until my 95-year-old mother mercifully passed away on April 30^th. With spring came news of the end of my daughter’s marriage and the loss of a son-in-law. Underlying all this, the steep decline of my husband’s health to the point of immobility. Then October 7^th happened and the world seemed to finally collapse. Even the launch of my novel, an accomplishment, seemed like a loss – no more intimate early morning hours spent with my protagonist. Queen Elizabeth’s got nothing on me. 2024 can’t come soon enough.

Artificial Intelligence is made by humans to simulate natural intelligence. Like most artificial things, it’s never as good as the original. Instead of enhancing our problem solving capabilities, we’ve abdicated our innate human ability to acquire, understand, and use knowledge to a computer. Yes, AI has more robust datasets than we could acquire in our lifetime but they will never be human. We can never instill empathy, compassion, altruism or love for one another in a machine. Losing those human attributes, will we become artificial beings ourselves? Having created this thing, how much of our humanity have we lost already?