There were three bees in the pool yesterday. Maybe four. One was still moving when my daughter jumped in, which sent a wave across the water, and after that I lost track of them in the ripple and the splashing and the specific joy of a small child who has been waiting all week to get in the water.

I watched her. I also watched the bees.

This is the thing about me that I've stopped trying to fix. I can't be in the pool with my child without also being in the pool with whatever else is in the pool. I can't be at the party without tracking who is alone in the corner. I can't sit in the yard and not notice the quiet that is building in what used to be full of birdsong. The aperture opened somewhere along the way and I don't know how to close it back down, and I'm not sure anymore that I should.

The bees weren't there by accident. They were there because there was nowhere else. Somewhere between the development and the lawn chemicals and the drought and the slow disappearance of the things that used to sustain them, a backyard pool started registering as a water source worth the risk. They flew toward the only water available. They didn't make it.

My daughter doesn't know any of this. She's three. She knows bees exist and that they make honey and that we shouldn't swat them. She doesn't know about colony collapse or aquifer depletion or what it means for a species to start making desperate calculations about suburban swimming pools. She just knows the water is cold and that jumping is the best thing in the world.

I want to be her. I am genuinely trying.

But I'm also in the water. And I see what she doesn't, and I can't unknow it. I stopped being able to unknow things somewhere in my early thirties, and I haven't yet decided if that's a gift or a wound, or if the distinction matters.

What I do know is this: the losses are real, and most of them go unwitnessed. The bees. The water sources that disappeared before anyone thought to name them. The version of a backyard afternoon that didn't require anyone to notice anything at all. I keep a tally nobody asked me to keep, for things nobody nominated me to care about.

This isn't unhappiness. I need to be precise about that because the two things can look alike from the outside. I can be moved by my daughter's joy and grieving a bee in the same breath, and neither one cancels the other out. I can carry the weight of what is disappearing and still be the person in the pool, laughing, catching her when she jumps.

But I'd be lying if I said the noticing doesn't cost me something. If I said I didn't sometimes wish the aperture would close, just for an afternoon. Long enough to get in the water without looking first at what is already in it.

It doesn't close. So I stand in it and I see what I see and I let her jump.

Someone has to stay in the room with the things that are disappearing. I didn't apply for this. But I'm not sure I'd choose differently.