It has been many days since I lost you. I’ve stopped keeping track when I packed up my life to grieve somewhere new. I half-expected to leave you there, in Queens, next to my grandmother’s diary and the two cats my uncle let sleep on my feet at night to keep warm. But you followed. So now I am sitting on a couch that has become familiar to the shape of me— my ass and the small of my back— and my grief. I’ve spilled so much of it on this couch. Once, I fell asleep on it and dreamt of sinking into it, but there was no bottom and I could not see the sunlight.

Hebe growls lowly at something I cannot see— a shadow, perhaps, that changes shape or disappears entirely to the human eye. Maybe it is an entity I’ve created by sitting still too long. (There is nowhere for energy to go once you’re dead. I’m basically dead because I don’t move. I once argued about death with a friend in college, who was so sure that ghosts existed because of this issue of trapped energy. I remember feeling slighted by the idea of ghosts because no one came to visit me. After this argument, I walked around my apartment for three days waiting for a poster to fall or a light to flicker on. In the dark, I often reach my arms out. I expect for someone to grab them, or break them, or hold me.)

Last night, my friends Heath and Simon knew I was sad and did not want to move from my grief couch, so they knocked on my door. Heath held two heads of cabbage and Simon held a bottle of gin. I said, What are you guys doing, to which Heath said, Feeding you.

As a kid, I didn’t like cabbage. I’m not very Irish, even though it makes up the part of the genes gifted by my mother. She doesn’t even like cabbage. But Heath held it, and he loved me, so I nodded and stepped aside.

He spread the ingredients out on the counter— the cabbage, fresh peppers, and every seasoning we had in our cabinet. Hebe stared up at him from his feet. I stared up at him from the couch.

More of our friends knocked on our door. Simon handed out cups of gin & tonics. We ran out of gin so I just ordered another bottle of it. All the while, Heath hummed in the kitchen, chopping vegetables with the sharpest knife I could find for him.

We spoke about driving to Corinth for his family’s Thanksgiving, about having to fit two air mattresses inside his childhood bedroom for Simon and me to sleep on. I pictured Heath’s teenaged decor: the posters, the novels strewn on his floor, the twin-sized bed. They are all ghosts of the person he was before I met him and became his friend, and it was such a delicate and tumultuous thought that I began to tear up. It was kind of pathetic. I thought about stepping into a shadow, and knowing this shadow, taking off your shoes inside of that shadow and sharing a meal. To me, that’s what friendship is— the knowing of someone else’s dark and choosing to sit in it.

The cabbage was quite good. Heath made it two ways. We all sat, cross-legged, around our tiny coffee table in front of the television. We threw out compliments about the cooking but mostly ate in silence. Except, this silence wasn’t frightening. Not at all.

Under the table, I texted you (rather, I texted your ghost, or your floating ball of energy) to tell you about loving new people that you will never meet. For a moment, the sinking feeling returned as I realized I will soon miss you for as long as I knew you, but then my roommate grabbed my arm and told me such a stupid joke that I came floating back up to the ground again. And I guess that’s how it will go forever. Sinking and grasping onto whatever ledge I can.

Today, I’m sitting in silence on my grief-couch, but tonight I must make dinner. I’ll stand to boil the pasta water and think about how your ghost self could be watching me drop the penne into it. Maybe you will turn off the stove for me or salt the sauce.

I call my best friend and tell them I want to come home. Everyone here is too smart. I don’t know anything about medieval literature, or about talking to those who do.

Everything I say is either too loud or too quiet. My peers blink at me. Maybe I used too many exclamation marks in my text. Hi! Exclamation. Do you want to hang out?! Question mark, exclamation. I sit and write, sit and write. I attempt to grab hold of the invisible thread of belonging. I’ve recently come to realize that, here, I do not belong as easily as I did in New York; I am unsure if it is due to my obvious, pathological need for it.

“You’re too hard on yourself,” my best friend says, as they always do. “You’re a good person.”

“Sometimes.”

“You’re a good writer.”

“Sometimes.”

“I’m not even lying. You know I’d be honest if I thought you sucked.”

They’re right. They’ve told me I sucked before— when I forgot to text them back for two and a half weeks last summer, when I didn’t know how to break things off with my ex girlfriend in college and led her on for weeks.

I am bad at texting and disappointing other people. I’ve learned that moving across the country means I must get used to texting back and disappointing other people.

I try to text my sister every day, and my mother twice a day. I try not to stare longingly at a picture of my friends and I at the lesbian bar in Park Slope. We’d all just come from teaching in three separate boroughs. We sweated into our wine coolers and laughed about nothing in particular. But we laughed so hard, and we cried because of it, and we pissed ourselves on the train. We held onto each other and didn’t even care. My girls. My gasping breaths of air.

My high school students send me email updates: a few are dorming upstate now, and the lack of car horns at midnight scares them. It’s too quiet. I tell them that I feel the same. I tell them that Oxford doesn’t have any good breakfast sandwiches, that I miss the man at the deli in Brownsville who knew my order and gave me discounts because he liked the way I smiled.

This summer, I learned my friend was buried in the same lot as my great grandmother—  that giant lot in Queens that spans 365 acres and holds over a million New Yorkers. In my last life, I drove past it often, but I could never pinpoint where everyone was. It all looked the same.

All of my people are alive and dead headstones away from each other. They are still living and dying. And I think: if I died, would they bury me here, in this unfamiliar soil? Would my mother have to brave her fear of flying just to touch me?

Tonight, I miss it: the A train at midnight, the lady who sells fresh mangos down the block from my uncle’s apartment, the now-closed Mexican restaurant that over-pours five dollar drinks, the friends I never felt the need to impress. My mother’s hot tea, the caretaking, the darkness of the living room. My father’s silence. My sister’s laughter. I miss belonging without having to try. Belonging to someone, to everyone.

Now, I sit on my roommate’s pissed-stained carpet and try to pet our new dog. She growls lowly, but she doesn’t move. She’s a good girl; she’s just nervous. We don’t know who tried to pet her before we scooped her from Memphis, who got their hands on her and tore a tiny piece out of left ear. Her nipples sag. She’s a mother.

“Babygirl,” we say. “Oh, babygirl.”

She’ll come around. When she trots around the living room, she looks at us with her wide eyes. She’s curious. She’ll come around. My roommates and I— we love her. Even when she bares her teeth and ducks her head. Her tail wags. Just a tiny bit. A thump.

4.

“I swear to God, that isn’t her.”

“They did her makeup all wrong. She never wore that much.”

“She looks older. Why does she look so old?”

“I think I'm gonna throw up.”

“Close your eyes. Just— grab her hand, and hold it. Feel her ring? It’s the one she got from the thrift last week. Remember? It’s still there. She’s still here.”

5. A mother stands on the edge of the freeway holding a sign that no one stops to read. The cars drive past. Exhaust clouds her from view.

   Faded letters say: Rem mber her na e.

We didn’t know.

I walked to the deli without you. Remembered crossing the street behind you. Watched you straighten your ghost back. Admired your ghost posture. So sure of yourself. So confident in the face of cars who didn’t stop, only drove faster, as you held up an angry hand.

The man at the deli asked where you had gone. The crossing guard asked where you had gone. The woman who stood outside of the school selling Bibles asked where you had gone.

He’s somewhere, he’s somewhere. Somewhere different— past Bedford, down Atlantic. Playing soccer and sipping coffee.

We called and texted some more. You didn’t answer. We worried. Watched the students graduate. Long gowns flowing, tripping over unsteady feet. Just fawns, all of them. About to take off and run. We worried.

I took the A home, hung off the poles slick with grease. I imagined you rocking back and forth in front of me, tipsy. Laughing. Here. There.

The last time we spoke, I told you about the full ride. The unruly juniors. The way I felt scared of moving South. And you told me, you told me— remember? Get the hell out of here.

I did. And you did.

When she broke the news, I had just gotten to the edge of the beach. Where the sand starts to drift into the water. I don’t like the beach. But I stood there. Stared into the open ocean. Thought of math. Thought of time. Thought of calling Tyler and David.

I texted him, I texted him. Hasn’t answered in weeks.

Cried to Sumi. Cried to Ashlyn. Cried to my mother. Cried to the black water. Texted you. Cried to you. Sent flowers. Cried a poem.

We didn’t know.

My friend, I text you still. Did you know? About how the sunrise looks from my new apartment. How the orange light blankets everything I can touch and not touch. I say the world is different now, I’m desperate for ghosts now, your ghost, your ghost arms, oh God I miss you, please reach out your ghost arms.

You are down Bedford, past Atlantic, playing soccer and sipping coffee. I will fly to you when you’re ready. You don’t have to move an inch.

Today, I spent seven hours sewing a fabric mouse with fabric glasses. The puppy I’m helping foster paws at my knees, the weight of her tail nearly knocking her to the ground. Tomorrow, she’s being shipped off somewhere up North. In her place, we’re taking in an elderly dog. We’ve decided to keep fostering. It gives us something to do when we don’t want to do the things we’re supposed to.

I start teaching my class about monsters and aliens in literature soon. My copy of Frankenstein sits, unread, on my desk.

I haven’t prepared anything for workshop. I’ve been too busy adjusting, breathing. Teaching a newborn how to stand without wincing, how to run without leaping. She’ll be eight weeks soon— she’s gained over three pounds since staying with us. My roommates named her Santana (after the band). We hope her new family keeps her name. She’s started to come when we call it.

Last month, I was certain I was born to die. Now I am the kind of person who fosters dogs and teaches and sews little stuffed animals.

The roadtrip from New York was long. Twenty hours. My father and girlfriend helped me pack the truck. They patted each other on the shoulder when the bags were piled on top of each other. My father said, “Well, that’s it,” and “Come visit us when she’s gone.” He handed her a house key. Just in case.

It was five in the morning and I was deliriously sad. I hugged my little sister and held her to my chest. I kissed her forehead. I kissed my dog and my girlfriend. I kissed my girlfriend once, twice. Three times. Kissed my dog again. Kissed the door to my childhood bedroom.

Goodbye, Bruno. Goodbye, Tabi. Goodbye, Fiona. Goodbye goodbye goodbye.

The road stretched wide. We made a pit stop to buy a man Cheetos to feed to his dog. They danced together on a bench in front of the gas station; the dog twirled around, chasing its tail, opening its mouth to catch treats. He looked as if he had never wanted for anything in his life. I shook his paw, and then the man’s hand.

“Real hot down in Mississippi,” he said.

“How hot?” I asked.

“You could fry an egg on the concrete.”

I hadn’t known what to pack, so I shoved ten sweaters in my luggage. Thirty books. Two mugs. A prayer card. My friend died when we were eighteen. I’m twenty-three now— an adult. A real one. She’s still resting 1,000 miles away. I want to stretch my arms wide, past dirt roads and over mountains. We are so old now. I want to hold her. We will only grow older.

The man hadn’t lied. It was hot, so hot. My mom’s face reddened. Her body sagged beneath the sun. She unwrapped a new pack of cigarettes and stuck one between her lips.

My father and I unpacked the truck. We did not exchange meaningful words. My housemates greeted us at the door— two girls, a few years older than me. A poet from India and a fiction writer from Boston. They were sweet. They told me that it’s okay to feel frightened. I told them I am, I am.

My mother held me to her like she did when I was just born and screaming. When there is a greeting, there is always a goodbye.

Goodbye, mom. Goodbye, dad. Hello, strangers. Hello, friends.

Now, I walk. Up a hill, around a corner. Both are foreign to me. I’m wrapped in my girlfriend’s sweatshirt. It smells like her cologne. I will never wash it again.

Insects hiss at me. Hundreds are hidden in the bushes. When I look up, the sun is setting, but it is still screaming, wailing, as it descends on and away from everything.

I read somewhere that thousands of bones are buried beneath the Mississippi soil. William Faulkner wrote novels stowed away in the corners of my new town. Maybe he thought about the bones, too.

Today, I read Famesick by Lena Dunham cover to cover. I did not complete any other task, aside from feeding myself crumbled pieces of a donut I accidentally left to melt in the car for six hours.

I started Famesick directly after reading the five-page poem my ex-girlfriend published about me to her Substack, in which she detailed various aspects about my personality that irritated her when we lived together: I sing too loudly, I cry too often, and I cannot stop complaining about my ailments.

Objectively, this was not a very good poem. She likened herself to a gay Helen Keller, too blinded (and deafened?) by my statuesque beauty to notice the claws I’ve dug into her skin, holding her to my emotional turmoil and physical disability. It is mean-spirited at best, and unnecessarily cruel at worst.

Fine. Okay. I can handle reading a poorly-veiled draft of an email she should have sent to a therapist. I can pick up the phone and listen to my friends act out certain lines in dramatic voices. I can laugh at the sheer absurdity of a creative writing major utilizing her half-baked, mixed metaphors as weapons, and kind of succeeding.

What I can’t do is respond in any conceivable way. Growing up, I couldn’t understand how people communicated their hurt without crying. My parents argued; my friends talked shit about other friends; once, I watched two toddlers scream at each other across two different strollers, babbling in their own baby language.

I often practiced hurling insults in the mirror, things I wished I’d thought of whenever someone was mean to me. I stared at myself and mouthed: Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.

As a teenager, I was diagnosed with a myriad of mental illnesses: Panic Disorder, PTSD, OCD, and the form of depression where you don’t do anything for a whole week besides play a phone game called Flow Free, perpetually connecting little dots but unable to solve the larger puzzle of figuring out how to function as a human being. (I’ve beaten the game three times.)

This was all… fine. Sometimes hard. Sometimes less hard. Life was easier when I was hungrier — for success, for love, for validation. In college, I spent a year working under the head of the writing department, gathering his packages and sending his emails to authors whose books were already scattered across my shelf. No challenge was too much; I could handle the busywork and the late nights editing social media posts for our school’s writing account that would only end up receiving five likes.

The noise — the compulsions, the flashbacks, the fears — quieted once I found something to occupy the raw, often concerning energy I carried from place to place. I entered every room with a smile and a pulsing need to fill each quiet moment of time with action. This also translated to hurt feelings — if someone broke my heart, I immediately bent to gather all the pieces.

When I found out I was cheated on by a girl I dated at twenty, I simply left her sleeping in my bed. I walked outside to sit on my porch, smoke one of my roommate’s nasty cigarettes, and call a friend.

“It’s 2 in the morning,” he said.

“Yeah. Got cheated on. But I have to work tomorrow, and break up with her so… I need to sleep at yours.”

I cried later, in his bed, while we watched a nature documentary. I remember staring up, through tears, into an image of a larger fish biting into a smaller one, red streaks of blood fading into the blue around it.

Reading my ex’s poem made me realize that I could never write something like it, even if I tried. Reading Dunham’s Famesick made me realize why.

I finally finished all six seasons of Girls this past January, then Tiny Furniture, then Creative Nonfiction. I’m twenty-three, the same age Dunham was when she wrote the pilot for Girls. I am gearing up to move across the country to pursue a near-impossible writing career. Like Hannah Horvath, I am often cocky without much to show for it. I am usually making things up as I go. I am selfish in ways some ex-girlfriends write poetry about.

Dunham’s character writing is choppy and invasive, quick-witted and terrifyingly representative of the matter that most of us are merely pretending to know what the fuck is happening to our bodies and to our minds, to the state of international politics and to the myths of sex and to the tumors sprouting on our elderly dog’s butt. How did our dog grow so old so quickly? How do we turn our fears of time and mortality into a joke that stretches across three episodes?

But Famesick is nauseatingly different than Dunham’s works of fiction, because it is real. It is often very ugly. It is a study of the way we perceive ourselves when we are not used to kindnesses.

(It is so real, in fact, that I spent ten minutes dry-heaving into the toilet upon reading about an experience she had with a man who did not care if she lived or died.)

Within the throes of my own self-pity, I shared in Dunham’s: her failed relationships, her painful physical ailments, her struggles with addiction. I watched her make decisions; I made them with her. (“I would’ve told Springsteen that, too,” I whispered to myself, alone in my childhood bedroom.) I mourned the loss of her uncle as if he were my own, and I celebrated her move to England as if I were moving into the bedroom next door.

Dunham quickly grew into a pseudo friend, one who apologizes for taking up space but quickly reassures me that I’m not taking up enough space.

My health battle began fairly recently. Last summer, I passed out once, and then twice, and a third time — in front of a house party in Brooklyn beside my little sister and the infamous ex-girlfriend. The doctors strapped me to a table and declared that I had Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, a condition that elevates my heart rate whenever I stand too quickly and stand too often, or for too long. There was really nothing I could do to treat it besides add a fairly large amount of salt to my diet and drink water.

Pretty soon after, I began utilizing a cane I decorated with a miniature keychain that looked like a vibrator. (Pictured below: my 2025 Dyke March outfit. I could not participate in the march itself without fainting.)

I’d just graduated college and stepped into an exhilaratingly exhausting career as an elementary school teacher in the Bronx. My ex and I moved into her mother’s apartment, which was around a fifteen (for my slowed gait) minute walk away from the nearest bus stop. With my nearly sixty hour work week — New York City charter schools are built differently — and my suddenly disabled body, it was difficult to walk the hill leading to the bus stop. I often chose to Uber the twenty minutes to work, much to the chagrin of my ex.

“Why can’t you just save the money and walk?” she’d ask.

“I just… can’t. I’m scared of passing out.”

Looking back, I felt her judgement everywhere, slinking into the depths of my greatest fears, all of which amounted to being someone else’s burden. But I couldn’t yet attach language to my health — how hobbling up a hill made me so dizzy I’d vomit, how I was embarrassed having to use a mobility aid but couldn’t rely on my own, now foreign legs to hold me.

While reading Famesick, I realized that the one feeling Dunham scarcely mentions is anger. She spends the story of her life holding a mirror to the emotions of others: her parents, her boyfriends, her business partner, the elderly woman she met at rehab with an addiction to Benadryl.

In everyone, she finds a common language, a thread she ties to her empathy — the man who hurled a chair at the wall she leaned against is simply misunderstood. The wild fear she felt in that moment was blanketed by a soft understanding that only a young woman can have.

But Dunham’s voice, fifteen years older, is a constant, nearly omniscient presence reminding us, and her younger self, that violence weaponized in pain is still violence. That anger wrapped in understanding is still anger.

As readers, we watch 23-year-old, and sometimes 33-year-old, Dunham excuse the behavior of those she loves because she does not want to accept the fact that she is not the only person who is flawed. Then, we watch her grow into a woman who recognizes that not every mistake made is her own, and that her health — both physical and mental — are not a burden to people who are worth staying.

What’s striking is that, throughout her life, she has not lost the hope of goodness existing in everyone; she has simply learned how to stand up to those who choose to enact only the bad.

This essay is not a book review or a character study of Lena Dunham. It is, in a way, a self-indulgent method of viewing the world through Dunham’s lens in an attempt to better understand my own internal struggles.

Isn’t that the beauty of storytelling? Of experiencing stories worth telling?

Like Dunham, and Hannah, and the protagonist of Tiny Furniture who is basically prematured Hannah, I am slowly gaining access to my anger, yet I refuse to lose the parts of me that wish to love without inhabition.

Famesick grants me the grace to read an ex’s Substack smear-campaign and not feel anything particular about it, to perhaps even express sorrow for the hurt behind it. It allows me to know that, one day, the anger may come surging in, all at once, an unstoppable force of energy.

At night, we gossiped across the room in muted, girlish whispers. We chewed on Little Bites and fruit bars from the abyss of snacks she stored beneath her bed. We spoke about ex lovers, ex friends, our parents’ marriages, our childhood crushes. The hours after 10 p.m. were sacred. I felt as though we redefined female friendship in a way that only truly mattered to us. It was revolutionary.

I had recently begun experiencing panic attacks. At the time, I truly believed I was going to die; my throat tightened, my heart palpitated, and my lungs paused their natural intake of air. My own dorm room, two buildings down the street, was a single. I knew I was lucky to have it, but at that time, being alone meant suffocating with no one there to see it. Sleeping alone meant closing my eyes and potentially never opening them again.

I wrote my will on a notepad next to my bed. I wanted to give my belongings to my little sister and my phone to absolutely no one (my Notes app was filled with embarrassing, fragmented poetry about invisible monsters and friendships that ended prematurely). I cried every time I felt myself slipping into sleep. I told myself, Okay, if I don’t wake up tomorrow, at least I did my laundry this morning.

It was not that I wanted to die— I simply convinced myself that it would happen on any day, at any hour, and in any way imaginable.

So, my friend Jenn let me move into her room and feel terrified of dying there. It was the biggest kindness that could have been afforded to me. Whenever I felt the tell-tale tingling sensation in my hands that signaled an oncoming panic attack, I silently looked to Jenn with wide eyes.

Somehow, she always knew exactly how to see me. To notice.

Originally, this essay was supposed to be about living with OCD— what it feels like to spiral without a solid reason as to why, what it feels like to be fearful of everything, all of the time, with no end in sight, what it feels like to feel so exhausted of living inside of your own body that you would do anything to cut the cord and surrender to the open air.

But upon attempting to place myself in the time that I was diagnosed, a familiar face kept popping up in all of my Big Important Memories: someone who sat with me in waiting rooms, held my hands as I cried, and unknowingly saved my life.

Jenn and I became friends before college even started. We met in a Facebook group and soon learned we had two things in common: liking Glee and liking Taylor Swift. Of course, we were freshly eighteen and dreading moving out of our childhood homes and away from our high school friends. Once we realized we were feeling the same level of fear, we basically leapt into each other’s arms.

“Oh my God, you’re terrified of becoming an adult, too?!”

“Yes! I want to start crying and never stop!”

But I soon learned that our connection ran deeper than sharing interests and a veiled sense of nihilism. Looking back on our first month of college, I now know that Jenn was someone who I was meant to meet. She was a friend I was destined to have.

As soon as we established our friendship, our lives at college fell into a new, exciting rhythm. We walked into parties with miniature flasks in our pockets, our arms linked between us. We styled our hair the same way— half-up, half- down. Together, we learned how to swoop the wings of our eyeliner and softly apply blush to our cheekbones.

Growing from a girl into a woman with someone else made me feel deserving of the life I’d promised to myself: one of laughter, of heartbreak, of the fierce and intimate knowledge of waving goodbye to teenhood.

Early on, we decided that we needed other friends, too, so we spoke to new people and soon formed a group filled with writers, artists, and filmmakers. We spent weekends shooting short films, throwing parties of up to twenty people in my 200-square-foot dorm room, studying for tests we already knew we’d pass.

There was not a day we did not spend time together. Often, we spent less time apart than we did in the same shared space.

We flopped onto my floor and shouted, “Let’s get drunk and play a game! Like, take a shot whenever Brittany says something stupid.”

(The backdrop of our friendship was Glee, until I entered a phase during our sophomore year when I’d exclusively watch Modern Family. She was supportive; my therapist was not.)

(Looking back, I hold more gratitude now than I ever have before for the fact that Jenn never seemed to judge my often questionable choices. I always used the excuse that I was just growing up, and that everyone made bad decisions sometimes. But I can now acknowledge that I was not always a good person, though I always tried to be. She loved me when I was failing at being good. Sometimes, I think that’s when she loved me the most.)

Past the happy and exciting moments, one sticks out to me the most: the day I truly learned how to be a friend.

I was pretending to take notes in poetry class when, suddenly, I received a text. Suddenly, Jenn’s father was ill, and the situation was very dire. Suddenly, I took three days off classes and traveled to Long Island in the backseat of her aunt’s car. I had packed nothing but a portable charger and a toothbrush, but I didn’t care. Jenn needed me. I didn’t yet know how to be truly needed.

We spent two days shuffling in and out of hospital waiting rooms, existing in the spaces between good and terrible news. I held her mother’s hand and hugged family members I had never met before, introducing myself as “Jenn’s Best Friend From College.”

She had other friends, too, from high school and early childhood. Sometimes, though I never admitted it, I felt jealous of the bond they shared with Jenn, planted years before I knew her. But during those three days, jealousy fell to the back-burner; we were all there, taking turns giving hugs and making off-colored jokes. Jenn was Our People, and we were hers.

Jenn’s dad recovered. I had never felt more relieved. Those days spent in waiting brought about a feeling of helpless I hadn’t experienced before. Truly, I did not provide anything but my physical presence, yet I felt as though I had run a marathon and came in last place.

I now know that being there for someone is a muscle which requires work. I’d experienced moments of being there for someone: holding my friend’s hand at our other friend’s funeral, assisting my mother in bathing when she didn’t have the strength, consoling my cousin through her first lesbian breakup.

But throughout Jenn’s dad’s hospital stay, I realized that friendship mattered the most in the quiet moments, ones where there is nothing to do but wait, nothing to say but, “Do you want to get Taco Bell?”

She was there for me, too, in ways previously unconceived to me. My OCD and panic disorder had spiraled into a period of time when I almost dropped out of school. It was Jenn who’d swept me to parties because she knew I’d feel better surrounded by other people, who’d sat with me while I convinced myself I was experiencing symptoms of a stroke, who’d suspected I had OCD but didn’t make me feel stupid for not suspecting it myself.

During the summer going into our junior year, the hot glow of our friendship simmered to a steady boil. Retrospectively, I know that we both played a part in why we stopped talking— I was clingy and didn’t know how to explain why; she was angry and didn’t know how to explain why. We were twenty and learning how to exist as human beings with hardships and feelings. Fixing our rift required understanding the nuances of issues we were too close to see.

I spent many nights grieving a friendship I thought would last forever. I now understand that it very well might, but it will never look the same as it once did. I now understand that it’s okay.

We didn’t speak for a school year. We avoided each other on campus and quickly leaned on other friends, who then became our closest circles. We walked past each other with no acknowledgment except for a sad, small, shared smile.

I wanted to tell her everything. Jenn, I kissed someone new; I finally finished the story I started working on last fall; my mom is sick again— is your dad doing better?

But I didn’t. I couldn’t tell if it was my own pride or an innate fear of rejection. It was probably a marriage of both.

We interacted once during our junior year. We were both at a protest for a ceasefire in Gaza; Jenn was live reporting the protest, and I was in the crowd. We made eye contact. In that moment, she looked so grown up to me— so sure of herself, so professional, and proud of her work. Beautiful and strong. I wondered how she saw me. Was she noticing that I’d changed, too? Did she view me in the good light?

Without thinking, I yelled to her, “Stay safe!”

She yelled back, “You too!”

Without thinking, I mouthed, “I love you.”

She mouthed back, “I love you, too.”

I held a hand to my heart; she mirrored the gesture.

Months later, we sat down to discuss where it all went wrong. We picked apart the layers of our friendship, of our near-codependency, the good and bad and ugly heads finally reared. We ended with closure and a hug that felt like partly like a goodbye, and partly like a promise.

But, when someone asks me when I finally knew the space between us was both healing and also remaining, I point to the last time we stood in a room together.

It was our final project reading. We’d spent the last year of college writing and preparing projects that gave us permission to finally graduate. I gathered a collection of short stories; Jenn wrote a thesis following the children of alcoholics. The Humanities department asked a small number of seniors to read and present their work.

Coincidentally, we were placed in the same room for our presentations.

Our families and friends flocked in to watch us recite our work. We sat beside each other at a long table, facing the crowd. I spotted her family— her mother, her aunt, her father. He appeared well. I nearly burst into tears out of gratitude that he was there, still there.

Jenn and I turned to each other and smiled. Suddenly, I felt shyer than I had the day we met in person four years ago. We had both grown; anyone could see it. We carried the weight of newfound adulthood on our backs. She no longer looked like the best friend I once had, and I didn’t look like hers.

“I’m really proud of you,” I said. “Really, really proud.”

“Me, too. I can’t believe we’re here.”

I couldn’t believe we were there either— on the precipice of graduation, of apartments in New York, of graduate school. I couldn’t believe we were there— sharing the same room, presenting the same hard work, not knowing anything about each other at twenty-two.

When my name was called, I stood up to speak to my small audience about how grief relates to time. How grief is ever-evolving with no end in sight, and so is love. How one cannot exist without the other. How time is memory; how grief is memory of love persevering.

I will always love Jenn— intimately, passionately, with both joy and sadness. I will always think about the days we spent being each other’s best friend, of the exhilaration of belonging to a power bigger than myself. But I also know that I will invite her to my future wedding; I will text her the future white dress, the future apartment and future Masters degree, and say, Do you remember when we dreamt about this? Together, can we remember what we went through to get here?

When I see that man with the thin sword walk briskly up the steps at the 80th St. station, I stand still.

I believe I am going to be stabbed. I think, I was anxious all the way home, and all of yesterday and last week, and I did it, I stepped into my fear and completed the mundane trek of my thirty-minute commute, and now I’m going to die because of it.

I picture keeling over those steps, one-hundred feet away from my uncle’s apartment. I cup my hands over my stomach and imagine blood pooling through the gaps of my fingers. I see a terrible photo of myself splayed on television screens across the country: 23-year-old woman slain in broad daylight by a man wielding a sword.

Of course, I am not stabbed. The man ambles past me until I can no longer see his sweatpants or his jacket or the gleam of the metal he balances in his fist.

This does not mean I am in the clear.

“Mom, I think I’m going to die,” I whisper into the phone.

A crackle on the other end. A cough. “You’re fine,” my mother says. “He’s probably on his way to Brooklyn.”

“He’ll… remember my face. And the next time he sees me he’s going to kill me.”

She sighs in a manner that means she thinks I am crazy.

“Go to sleep. Eat dinner first. And take your meds.”

That night, I lay on the stiff cot I shoved into my uncle’s storage closet and stare up into the cracks of the ceiling. The window beside me still blows cold air, even after we unfolded thick sheets of plastic and taped them to the glass to keep all the heat inside.

I reread my letter of admission from graduate school for the fiftieth time since receiving it.

Dear Kay,

Congratulations! We are delighted to offer you a position in our Fall 2026 Fiction cohort. Our faculty love your work and we would be thrilled to have you join us here, across the country, despite your debilitating fear of airplanes and change and also being alone.

I swipe an ugly tear and let it slide off my thumb. Then, I scream into my pillow so aggressively that my uncle’s cat leaps off my lap and onto the carpet.

“Sorry,” I tell him. “Come back.”

He stares at me for a moment before slipping through the wooden divider separating the storage closet and the kitchen. Inside, I can smell the Pepián my aunt stirs in her father’s steel pot, layered over my uncle’s cigarette smoke that wafts in from the living room.

I have not told either of them about the man with the sword, like I haven’t told them about the panic attacks on my flights to and from Chicago last week, or the way I sometimes feel like I am about to die without a reason.

Well, there is actually always a reason. My heart could burst inside my chest like my first best friend’s did when we were five. Or, like my grandmother, I could push too hard on the toilet. Or I might get pushed onto the tracks, and the train is incoming, and there is no time to do anything but close my eyes and feel it.

My aunt flings open my wooden divider and shoots me an odd look.

“It’s dinner time,” she says. “Stop daydreaming.”

During our virtual session, my therapist tells me to lean into my fear.

“How do I do that without falling?” I ask.

“What do you mean?”

“There’s just… so much of it. The fear.” I attempt to patch a hole in my stress ball as we spoke. It wheezes air like it, too, is dying. “I walk onto the street, and I believe I’m going to be attacked by a stranger. I step onto a plane, and I think it’s going to malfunction and crash and burn. I try to sleep, and I can’t, because I’m too scared of not waking up in the morning, even though I don’t have a reason to be scared, but I still have to write a letter to everyone in my notes app that says goodbye and I love you and I want to give the 400 in my savings to my sister.”

She pauses, takes in a breath. Over Zoom, I can see her eyes flit back and forth. The clock behind her strikes another new hour.

“The man with the sword could’ve just felt like carrying a sword,” she finally says.

I laugh abruptly. “Well, that’s fucking weird. Why would he do that?”

“I don’t know,” she tells me. “Honestly, he might be crazy. Or he might be into cosplay and the sword is part of his costume. The point is, though, is that you don’t know, either.”

“And I can’t assume the worst?”

“Well, you can. It’s what your brain has literally trained itself to do. But you also have to remember that a plane can fly over one hundred miles with two failed engines and land safely.”

I don’t mention the fact that I was the one who told her that.

“And,” she continues, “you can move across the country knowing that even the worst doesn’t have to end in disaster.”

After we hang up, I decide to type a final email before I try to sleep.

Good evening,

I would love to attend your university this fall. Thank you for your belief in my work.

Although I fling my phone across the room after I hit send, its light still glares and casts shadows. In them, I see the silhouette of a nervous woman. She clutches her blankets and picks at the little holes in them with her nails.

This woman is terrified all of the time. She watches herself exist, splayed against the wall, encompassed entirely in her fear. It may be a trick of the light, but her hands are not shaking as hard as they were a second ago.

The tremors will return when the sun rises and she realizes she has to climb out of bed and into a world full of things that can hurt her.

But, for right now, her hands are still. The man with the sword could have just liked feeling the stability of the metal against his palms. It might have just cooled him. It was a hot day, the first of spring.

As an elementary school teacher, I am always prepared for the worst.

I have studied each and every crevice of my classroom, tested the locks, and ensured the windows can be opened quickly. My students know how to stack their desks against the door and crawl into the corner, how to turn out the lights and press their fingers to their lips.

As a teacher, I know that it is possible my last spoken word will be run. It is a fact that I may have to use my body as a shield.

My generation of teachers grew up within the context of violence. We participated in the same lockdown drills we now practice with our students. The evil that lurks among us is palpable. At night, we endure nightmares of gunfire and blood. In the morning, with bleary eyes, we smile at our students and press down our deep fear of the unknown. We attempt to counteract our terror by tapping into joy.

But what do we do when the evil among us is not just a man with an AK-47, but the government? What do we do when we walk into school and realize that three of our students have been kidnapped?

I sat my students down on the carpet and tried my best to attach language to our shared grief. Behind us, the artwork of the students stolen by ICE fluttered from the wall, untouched.

While I explained that we would never see our friends again, I pictured them and their families. When someone began to cry, I remembered the bows in their hair and the gummy grins of their baby siblings, the enthusiastic faces of their mothers. I imagined the fear and the violent funneling of their bodies into unmarked ICE vehicles.

Were my students clothed? Were they fed? Who was holding their hand, or hugging them? They were only children. I just taught them how to write their addresses. They did not understand how quickly an address could disappear, or how a home could be destroyed, before the sun even rose. They shouldn’t have had to.

I attended a protest in Brooklyn and spotted one of my students on its outskirts. His nose was chapped from the cold. His teenaged sister, who I recognized from pickup, slung a protective arm around his shoulders, toting a cardboard sign with the other.

Their mother was recently deported. They now lived with their grandfather and six cousins.

“Ms. M!”

He broke free from his sister’s grip and barreled into my legs. Although he was very small and could never actually injure me, I pretended to fall down on my butt. I wanted to hear his laughter.

His sister spotted us and shot me a tentative smile that did not reach her eyes.  I waved in return, holding her gaze for a long moment. I love you, I’m sorry, I will protect him as best I can. Who is protecting you?

“Can we watch Bluey tomorrow?” he asked.

“You bet,” I said, adjusting his scarf. “But your sister looks lonely. You should go keep her company.”

I watched as he dutifully returned to her side, easily pressing into her coat. My eyes remained on the two of them for the next hour, even as I screamed my throat raw on my helplessness that was suddenly outweighed by anger.

When I look around, I cannot tell if everyone is as angry as I am. When I watch the news, I cannot tell if the anchors grasp the words on their cue cards. When I walk into my classroom, I cannot tell my students about my anger. I merely open my arms to embrace theirs.

I am writing this essay because, today, I learned that my favorite student I’ve ever had was taken by ICE. She is seven, her favorite show is SpongeBob, and she loves to sketch princesses on the back of her worksheets.

At the end of every day, she ran into her mother’s arms. Her baby sister sat in a stroller and grasped the air with chubby fingers. Their family is beautiful, and strong, and happy. They are now fractured beyond comprehension.

Through our screens, we are all complicit. We watch our neighbors kick and scream with their wrists zip tied behind their back. We lay in our beds and stew in anger, in grief, in guilt.

Many avert their gazes. But how can you ignore an empty desk? A barren driveway? A parentless child?

My students are being kidnapped in front of my eyes. How do I shield them from the violence that is somehow legal?

Each night, I close my eyes and see their faces. I remember their scrawled handwriting, the excited way they flipped the pages of their books. I know that they will follow me forever— the memories of them, and the unanswered questions of where they are and if they’re safe.

There is not a sufficient way to end this essay. My devastation will never cease, and my anger will grow. Yours should, too.

The day my mother had her breasts cut off, the neighbor’s dog fled his backyard. He must have dug a hole deep enough for the heaping mass of his body to burrow and crawl into. The dribbles of drool hanging from his jowls, the wisps of fur matted with mud, the sharp black toenail on his left paw— he left no ounce of himself behind. By the time his owner realized he’d carved a door out of the soft soil planted beside their fence, he was long gone, perhaps galloping across the northern highway. 

The neighbor’s two children began to cry in deep, desperate gasps. They were still small and still believed the elopement to be personal. They waddled about the tall grass, the toddler still in diapers, wiping the tears and snot from their faces with messy fists. Their mother knelt in her long floral skirt and embraced them, her arms opening and then closing, fingers twirling short strands of their wispy hair. 

Two hours later, down the road from the hospital, my family passed what little was left of the pet: a dark trail of what looked, to the naked eye, like slime. A pile of fur and tattered skin. A scruffy tail chopped nearly in half. 

At the sight of it, my father retched out of the car window. The remnants of last night’s dinner splattered across the gravel and pooled around the husk of the poor animal who simply wanted to act on his innate desperation to flee.

I certainly didn’t blame him one bit for it; by the time we arrived at the General Surgery unit and my mother was asked to strip down to her socks, I believed that she, too, would have risked the spread of her entrails down the pavement for the slight chance of freedom.

Free: a single syllable, the length of an inhaled breath, and she’d risk it.

I knew this because I would risk it, too, and we are very similar women.

“Remind me again,” she told me as a nurse wheeled her gurney down the long hallway bathed in overhead lights, “of what would happen if I refused this operation.”

“You’d probably get sicker,” I said.

“Would I die?”

I flinched. “Maybe.”

“Okay,” she said, and nodded. “I choose this.”

Her gurney slipped past the open door to the operating room and I thought of the neighbors’ dog again— the sight of his splayed innards, and the tail.

I wondered if his immortalized body was also fragmented. Did he float up to heaven that way and stay separated, forever searching for all the missing pieces of himself?

My mother spent ten years in remission before the cancer came back.

We all knew a repeat diagnosis was likely. During her first bout of disease, she discovered she carried the gene that raises chances of breast cancer by close to sixty percent.

I found out I may carry it, too. It is probably somewhere hidden inside my body. It might be lurking right beside my heart. It is waiting to kill me.

“It won’t kill me” was the first thing my mother rushed to tell me. “It’s only Stage Two.”

I begged her to let me take the semester off anyway, but she refused. She told me I’d grow to resent her. She yelled at me for wanting to risk my future when she never even graduated high school. Then, she cried. She cried for a long time.

“I don’t even want to get married,” I said. I touched the stubborn tears that clung to her lashes, though I did not wipe them completely away. “I don’t want to have kids or get married.”

“You will,” she said.

“I won’t.”

Not without you, I thought, but did not dare say, I need you too much.

She tucked a cigarette between her lips. I watched her inhale. The grass in our backyard grew yellow eight summers ago. We sat down in it anyway, and I curled a long strand around my thumb. Then I started tugging so much of it out from the soil.

I constructed piles of these dead things— things that were already decaying but not quickly enough. Was it easier to allow them to suffer? Is yellow a more beautiful color than green? How long can something live when no one takes care of it? The animals need somewhere to burrow, but they also die, and sometimes you cannot tell if they are young or old, or if their cells are metastasizing, and multiplying, and eating themselves.

Are their children crying for them?

Two days after her surgery, I drew my mother a bath. I bought a bottle of jasmine  soap and two large, purple sponges. I read in a Buzzfeed article that while pink is the color most closely characterized by womanhood, purple represents wisdom and luxury.

It is also the color of mourning.

Her bottom half sunk below the soapy surface, but her chest remained suspended above water. The bandages were not supposed to get wet.

She did not speak as I lathered the sponges and gently rubbed circles on her upper back. Her eyes focused on the ceiling, the sink— anywhere but my own.

I felt her shoulders relax and lose their rigid tension. She tilted her head until it hit the edge of the tub, and her eyes fell closed.

Though she did not speak, her hand squeezed mine.

Though I did not speak, I squeezed back.

I thought again of the dog, and the waiting room, and the grass. Everything is cyclical, really, like how mother sinks back to child and child, somehow, becomes her nurturer.

The only tangible things we have are our hands, and soap, and freedom. Freedom is cyclical, too. Perhaps it is more terrifying than death; you may not recognize it until it leaves.

I held tighter to her. That, in itself, was a kind of freedom, too.

At seventeen, I met a college student. She was not my first lover or the first woman to have touched me, but she was the first to hold my power in her hands.

Sun-dipped and delicate, she fed me edibles from her palms and watched me chew. She snorted ketamine and carried a satchel of herbs around in her pocket. We walked her dogs down her bleak street, speaking about space and time, and the entire history of the earth. When did we begin to name ourselves? What is so important about owning a name?

When she guided me into the shower and touched me, I thought, I own and am owned my nothing.

I moved her hands away from my legs, my sprawled stomach, white as a sheet. Instead, I placed them on her own hips. I stared into the dip of her collarbones.

Then, drunk off a half-emptied bottle of Svedka, we fell into my twin bed. She ran her freckled fingers through my hair and pulled at the tresses and tendrils.

“It’s so thick,” she said. She brought her nose to it. “I want to be lost in it.”

She braided it and kissed the back of my neck with an open mouth. We slept and awoke to the early breath of the sun.

On my own, I showered and gently unweaved each strand of my hair, massaging my scalp with shampoo. I thought about love, and sex, though I couldn’t consolidate the two: my parents never loved each other, but they shared a bed, and they had me.

The woman moved away to Chicago, and then New York City, and then somewhere else I can’t remember.

I just know that I was still a girl until I wasn’t, that, one morning, I woke up and crept my fingertips along the soft sidewalks of my body and knew I had grown wiser.

Once I was aware of myself as woman, I  sounded out my name, shortened it, chopped it down the middle. I met other women, some who recited poetry as I sprawled naked across their laps, stretched open like a cat, and others who spoke of their anger with sharp, pierced tongues. I began meeting all of these women and forming all of these romances, except many were romances that only existed in my head, but the physicality was everywhere, crawling and creeping to meet me with the urgency of pages dropped from a very tall height.

“I would like for you to wrap a hand around my neck,” one told me, separating my fingers and sliding them over her jugular, “like this. Squeeze the sides. Yeah, like that.”

I realized I wore womanhood differently than others, and that I belonged to a secret society of women who loved showering with other women, and choking other women, and allowing other women to grab their hair and tug. I enjoyed the soft, subtle closeness of sharing a single breath and passing it back and forth. A cigarette balanced between a pair lips, an inhale from another, tongues pressed into the gaps of smooth front teeth.

I didn’t say the word lesbian until I entered college. Then, I bathed myself in the word: lesbian, lesbian, lesbian. I realized I did not know the history of the word, so I read books about the word, and I watched films about the word where I saw my body in other bodies.

When I had sex, I recited the beautiful word in my mind, and often aloud, to the other lesbian beneath me, or on top of me, as I had begun to enjoy relinquishing control once I realized I did not need it. I laughed the word and cried the word, chewed on it until it grew mushy in my mouth.

There is excitement in loving the world because you love a word, and you love being that word, and you love living in a body and wearing a name that is that word.

There is power in knowing your own name, and in tasting it.

Last night they painted words all over

the trees; in the morning,

they remained. In the dark, they glowed.

The sky has opened with the

holy intention of swallowing us all:

from the bird’s mouth, she crows,

believer, believers, believed.

A planet cannot fit into another.

A light cannot absorb more light.

The man beds his wife; the neighbor

cooks something sweet; the squirrel

scurries atop a live-wire; the doctor

dissects a mother’s stillbirth; you sit

still on your sofa and stare up

into blackness peppered with more blackness.

Your brush strokes the beginnings

of the end, a little red mixed with

orange and brown.

Fire everywhere— the animals have

begun to burrow under the soil.

The grandfather’s thumbs are

once again wrinkled with spit.

When my ex-girlfriend’s mother kicked me out of our apartment— because it was her apartment, really, even though she let us live there and my ex-girlfriend spent many hours reassuring me that, yes, I can hang up photographs, too, even beside their family portraits— I quit my inner-city teaching job, hauled my ass back to Long Island, and listened to forty-two hours of Audrey Hobert’s album, Who’s the Clown?

I loved that fucking teaching job. I loved that fucking apartment. I love that fucking album.

If I’d not already spent my rock-bottom in a coma, I would think this to be it: laying in my childhood bed, unemployed for the first time in a decade, and deeply, deeply saddened by the loss of my very own refrigerator. (My parents’ fridge is smaller and sadder.)

Of course, U-Hauling is the international lesbian stereotype and I’d upheld it to the very best of my ability. I was in love and dumb because of it, except the act of loving someone so much didn’t feel dumb— it was the only form of religion I had ever wanted to practice.

(We’d written poems and stuck them in lunch boxes. We’d compiled our books together on one shelf. We’d named our future dogs after each member of Fleetwood Mac. Our love hung over our heads like a God of some sort, shapeless and glowing. Our whispered nighttime conversations were prayers.)

Now that God and my relationship are both dead, I am applying to graduate school and trying to reconnect with every hobby I’ve ever had and every person I’ve ever met.

I learned a new song on guitar. I day drank with my 8th-grade girlfriend. I became a dedicated member of weekly trivia, except my friends and I often attend multiple times per week, enough for the host to know us by name. Then, I realized I’d always done these things but as a different person— a naive one, maybe, but a happier one. A mere visitor. A nomad.

I recently stopped calling my childhood home my parents’ house. My childhood bed is as mine as it ever was. It is indented again with the shape of me.

I hope that, next year, I’m living in a new place with a new purpose. Perhaps I’ll even take a new name. My clothes will be different— cooler, maybe. I’ll carry a notebook around with me and scribble in it in public because I’d already have come to terms with the fact I love looking mysterious and unapproachable.

I’m turning 23 next month. I’m going on an L Word-themed bar crawl with my friends. The last time I went to a lesbian bar, I tried to flirt with a Butch lesbian and ended up counseling them about the state of their newly-opened relationship with their long distance girlfriend in Florida.

“Close it,” I told them. “Stay in love.”

They squinted. “You don’t want to kiss me right now?”

Truly, I considered the possibility of slinking into a dark corner and opening my mouth to meet a stranger’s tongue.

I’d thrifted a black lace slip for the occasion and spent an hour applying heavy-handed makeup— I knew I looked good. No, I looked hot. I looked like I could sink my teeth into skin, bite down and suck.

“No,” I said. “I don’t.”

When I sent them on their way, they promised to communicate better with their long distance girlfriend in Florida. I felt like a lesbian prophet. I felt all-knowing. I felt vaguely religious.

While throwing up an hour later, I decided that God is the act of loving. It’s my friends who rubbed my back and kissed me chastely on my damp forehead. God is Audrey Hobert’s album I cannot, for the life of me, stop listening to. God is my ex-girlfriend and my childhood bedroom, the old love letters and the future ones, too, and the strangers I brush shoulders with on the subway.

At night, I pray to an empty ceiling. I pray to no one in particular. I pray to Love itself, for more of it.

I’d walked into the bedroom at midnight with tears in my eyes and a killer migraine (glass in my temples, always to the right, beneath the eye) because, for some reason, I was picturing the carcass of our neighbor’s senile dog, who’d jumped his enclosure with the prowess of a dove and sliced his stomach clean open. Cornucopia, I’d thought when we found him, and felt badly for thinking it, and thinking of it again, and once more: cornucopia. (We were supposed to drive down to Jersey next month and celebrate Thanksgiving with my great uncles. That’s it: I was reminded of Thanksgiving.)

You laid partly on my side of the bed, which was both endearing and deeply unsettling since I could not shift you without waking you. So, I molded my body into an apostrophe, draped your left arm around my stomach, and nuzzled into it. (Also, I could not help but lift your sweater sleeve to my nose and inhale your stale breath, but only once.)

I realized you hadn’t held me like this since July and that you were not actually holding me— I was holding your arm to my stomach and, in essence, holding myself. I thought again of the dog and his insides that spilled from his open cavity. If he had an arm slung around his torso, he might not have died so quickly. (In fact, he might have met the birds who emptied him and stretched his innards into the air with sharp beaks.)

In my memory, we died a million times over— in every violent way imaginable— but we were never in bed. We never passed in our sleep. So I relaxed into the peace of it all and reveled in how comforting it was to keep my insides bubbling in my body, and to feel yours, too, silent, or nearly silent.

My hometown contains my adult friendships born from teenage grief.

During holiday breaks, we drive past the gravesites and speak about the mundanity of our lives: someone is going to grad school; someone else completed the New York Times crossword in ten minutes; did everyone hear that the funny girl from middle school has two kids now?

The unspoken is louder than our voices because the unspoken is also tangible and gigantic. It’s a magnet on our fridge. It’s a picture frame collecting dust in our closet. It’s the incessant phone calls we make to our college roommate when he doesn’t answer the first time and we are frightened he is lying dead on the kitchen floor.

“I’m okay,” he tells us, “Jesus, stop worrying so much.”

Our therapists can’t quell our nerves. Our parents tuck the blankets under our chins and pray to God. A new friend who didn’t know the deceased casually spills their name from their mouth. It is only when they are looking at us expectantly that we realize they are speaking of a stranger, someone who is still alive.

We want to say, “Oh, we loved someone with that name. Please ask about them because time is slipping and we’re scared we cannot remember the pitch of their laughter.”

But we don’t. We’ve discovered that memories are treasures and very few deserve a bared chest.

During daylight, we continue as normal. We celebrate birthdays, work our jobs, kiss our lovers, walk through Central Park with library books in our hands.

At night, we leave one candle burning. Just one. The flame flickers and slides down its charred wick, powerful enough to slide through skin tissue but still smaller than a quarter. We admire the little light. We know lights are also ghosts.

Candle smoke billows over our heads and forms the vague shape of a body lost to wind.

We embrace this empty body. We cry all our love into it.

(Trigger warnings: mentions of suicide, brief depictions of sex.)

“My brother’s in rehab again.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“He wouldn’t care if I died. Would you?”

“I’d be devastated,” Lucille says. “Do you want to die, Joe?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Seems peaceful.”

“Well,” she pauses to bite the remnants of polish from her right thumb, “that doesn’t seem like a very good reason to kill yourself. Peace isn’t happiness. Peace is nothing. And maybe it’s also everything.”

“Everything is nothing,” Joe says.

“Exactly.”

She pictures Joe peering over the ledge of his apartment building. He forms an O with his lips as smoke slithers into the frosted air. Maybe the grey proof of his breath cements him to the living; perhaps the cigarette in his right hand is flameless because the sky is weeping for him.

Seconds pass: his coat is probably drenched, his thick beard most likely stinks of sweat and mildew. She presses an ear to the receiver and searches for his breath above the droning of the A/C unit. It hangs precariously off the edge of her office window.

This is Joe’s sixty-first phone call to the Washington Suicide Hotline. Lucille has taken forty-five of them since she began her part-time position as an operator last May.

She learned that Joe calls when he’s lonely. He feels the most lonely when it rains. He is 54 years old, addicted to cigarettes, and lives with his mother, who is also addicted to cigarettes. His older brother became hooked on meth a decade ago and pockets Joe’s disability checks to buy it.

A thought suddenly occurs to Lucille: Joe might not be breathing anymore—he has tossed himself into empty air and exploded into a flat sludge of tattered skin and gore. The rain carries him into the sewers, rinsing his skeleton clean, leaving behind the compounded meat of his heart.

Finally, he coughs. The sound is beautiful. She can nearly smell the spit and phlegm emerging from the back of his throat.

She slumps in her chair and presses two fingers to her neck, palming her stomach with her other hand.

“Are you happy?” Joe asks.

“I’m… at peace,” she says.

“Well.” He coughs again. “Isn’t that something?”

Her roommate, Dana, is crying. This isn’t an uncommon occurrence. Last week, a man she met on a dating app asked her if she would fuck raw, and when she said no, he rolled over and started playing a poker game on his phone. That night, Lucille returned home to find her sobbing next to a half-empty bottle of red wine.

“It’s like I was invisible!” Dana cried. Then she burped. “My tits were out, and I’d shaved, and he didn’t look at me once.”

This time, a thirty-four-year-old bouncer she met at the club started ignoring her texts after he learned she had dropped out of college to act in an off-Broadway production of Oklahoma! that tanked after six performances.

Lucille rubs her heaving shoulders and wipes her tears. Dana’s dollar-store mascara tracks down her cheeks and forms a heavy ring around her slightly uneven eyes. Lucille tries not to imagine her as an animated raccoon. She fails.

“He’s a dick,” she says. “Whose name is Ralph, anyway?”

Dana lets out a garbled laugh. Lucille looks down at the pint of ice cream on her lap and realizes it has melted into a puddle on the sofa. She decides not to care.

“His parents hate him,” Dana says. “They named him Ralph and conceived him in Long Island.”

“On Long Island,” Lucille corrects. “He’s also kind of ugly. Huge ears.”

“He has a giant tattoo on his back.”

“Of?”

“A realistic portrait of his childhood dog.”

They watch reality television. Dana doesn’t ask about Lucille’s day, which is another common occurrence. She doesn’t mind it, though. She likes listening. She believes that listening is love.

Once, when she was having trouble sleeping, she called Dana into her bedroom to tell her about high school. Even though she graduated a decade ago, her face lit up as she regaled Lucille with stories about her boyfriends, two of whom she dated simultaneously.

“It was like polyamory,” she explained, “but Jack didn’t know about Shawn, and Shawn knew about Jack; they were both on the water polo team.”

Lucille must have nodded off. When she woke up, Dana was still speaking.

“Isn’t that insane?” she asked. “Like, Ashley knew he was cheating on her, and she still dated him for another six months.” She looked down at Lucille. “Why do women stay with men who hurt them?”

Lucille blinked heavily. “It’s all they know how to do.”

“That’s so true, Luce.” Through her haze of half-sleep, she watched Dana smile. “How do you always know what to say?”

Her eyes closed again on their own accord.

Lucille’s older sister, Megan, flung herself off her eleventh-story balcony nearly two years ago.

At the time of her death, their mother stood at her kitchen stove and sliced fresh sourdough into contained squares, speaking to Lucille over the phone about her recent vacation to Hawaii. In between sentences, she hummed a sweet, airy tune beneath her breath.

“I gotta go, Mom,” Lucille said. “I’m running late for an interview.”

“Oh, do let me know if… Chad? I think his name is Chad— anyway, Chad can set you up with a job in your father’s office. It’s very peaceful work, Lucille.”

“Thanks, Mom. Will do.”

Ten minutes after they hung up, her mother called again.

“What, Mom?” Lucille huffed in annoyance. “I just said good—”

Her mother screamed. It was a warped, elongated vowel, a chorus of a low oooooh and ohhhh— a discovery, it seemed, or a sudden understanding of something already known but hidden deeply away.

Lucille could not make out a word. She did not know what had taken place until she arrived at her childhood house an hour later, skidding her car so abruptly in front of her mailbox that her tires rested partly on the front lawn. She found her mother sitting outside in the pouring rain, her soaked bathrobe clinging to her thin legs. Her father stood behind her and rubbed her heaving shoulders. His face contorted into what Lucille recognized to be sorrow.

They raised their heads to look at her. Lucille took a shaky step towards them, her heels catching on the damp soil.

When she approached, her mother dropped to her knees. She grabbed onto Lucille’s bare ankles and dug in with her nails. “Why?” she shouted. “Why?”

And yet, no one knew. Even still. Even now. After the mass and the burial, Lucille moved into an apartment two miles away from her parents’ house. She quit unemployment and, against her therapist’s wishes, found a job working the phones at the suicide prevention hotline. She then quit therapy; all she could ask on that rickety couch was why. She found it easier to pose the same questions on her own, slightly more comfortable couch.

She found herself asking her callers why they wanted to die.

“To get rid of my mortgage,” one said.

“To be with my husband again,” another supplied.

Joe did not have any sort of answer.

“I guess I’m tired,” he said. “Man, maybe I still won’t get any sleep when I’m dead anyway.”

“Does your brother make you want to die?”

Joe laughed. “Nah, he makes me wanna live out of spite.”

So now, Lucille visits her parents once per month and spends the rest of her time watching television with Dana. She stopped asking questions she couldn’t find answers to. Outside of work, she had mostly stopped speaking at all.

“Why’re you so quiet?” Dana once asked.

“I’m trying to solve a hard equation in my head,” Lucille said.

Dana raised perfectly-plucked eyebrows. “Okay, nerd.” She laughed. “Geez, you remind me of my sister. She’s, like, a math whiz.”

“I’m not a sister,” Lucille said. “I’m not anyone’s sister.”

“But you’re literally like my little—“

Lucille stood up from the table, flicked the lights off, and disappeared into her bedroom.

Every other week, Megan’s husband calls Lucille at two in the morning and begins to cry into the phone. He speaks about his dead mother, his dead wife, and his dying Great Aunt Martha. She tries to console him the best she can, which takes the form of silence wrapped in small hums of agreement.

Sometimes, when she agrees to drive the forty minutes to his one-bedroom in the outskirts of Seattle, they fuck silently. Their inability to find words can only be explained by their new and foreign realities.

Suddenly, they are so lonely. Suddenly, the only connection between them is Megan, and their desperate utterances of why. Suddenly, they must anchor themselves to skin and bone. They must grow hot enough to cauterize their wounds.

He only spoke once during sex, and it was to tell Lucille he loved her.

“Don’t say that. Pull out right now.”

He hung his head. She was glad he felt ashamed— he didn’t love her, and he loved Megan, and he used Lucille’s body to prove that to himself. And he did pull out, but not quickly enough.

She visited him at Walgreens last week to tell him she was pregnant.

“You keeping it?” he asked. He scanned her carton of half-expired milk and box of Dots.

“Perhaps,” she said. “But I just wanted to let you know. Also, I needed milk.”

Megan probably hates Lucille for housing her husband’s child in her womb.

Before she jumped, she stuck an envelope in the alcoves of her bedroom pillows, sealed with her spit and addressed to no one in particular. She informed the world that she believed in reincarnation and wished to come back as a baby with no ties to anything but an umbilical cord.

Lucille’s not sure what appealed to her sister about repeating life, but she imagines Megan’s soul in a newborn body popping out of her vagina in the form of their shared kin. She becomes so frightened that she pops a loose Benadryl floating at the bottom of her purse.

At work, a woman babbles to Lucille about the death of her dog. In the extreme process of chasing a squirrel, he careened off the steep edge of a cliff behind her house.

“He might come back,” Lucille tells her. “With a brand new body and a fear of heights.”

“What’s your favorite color?” Joe asks.

“Blue,” Lucille says, “but you already know this.”

“Yeah, but what kinda blue? Cerulean? Navy?’

She pauses to think. Megan’s prom dress was teal. At the time, Lucille was twelve and thought it to be the ugliest concoction of fabrics she’d ever seen, but at the funeral, she slung a teal piece of fabric over the closed casket to hide scuff marks she accidentally dug with her nails.

“Teal,” she says.

“Mine’s yellow and red. Can’t choose.”

“Are you safe, Joe?”

“I reckon I am when I’m talkin’ to you.”

“That’s good,” she says, “but since you’re not in danger, we have to hang up in a few.”

“Well, that doesn’t make any damn sense, does it?’

She releases a laugh that startles her. She forgot how her voice sounds when someone tugs something out of it that isn’t just breath.

“Bye, Joe,” she says. “Call me tomorrow. It’s supposed to rain.”

When she cannot sleep, Lucille’s fingers will trace across her stomach. She will listen to owls hooting on YouTube. She will cup a palm-sized amount of fat and hum the songs she learned in childhood. She will swear she can hear small whines escape through her belly button.

It is crying out for me, she’ll think, begging me to let it open its eyes to the harsh light of a new world.

In her dreams, Megan’s crushed body is sinking into the soil, but the gravediggers don’t stop at six feet, and they etch a hole deep enough to reach the center of the earth, and they toss Lucille and Megan and the fetus into it, and they are all falling into a portal that shrinks them into nothing, and they can still see and hear each other, but they can’t feel, not at all, not even when they reach the bottom and explode into particles.

For moments at a time, they look like raindrops. They are screaming so loudly it startles the life in hiding.

* * *

“You should really find something less morbid,” Lucille’s mother tells her over the phone. “Dad said he could hook you up with Jonah— no, wait, James— yes, James?” She often speaks with question marks tacked to the ends of her sentences. “James can get you a job at his bank. Busywork, you know? Office work.”

“I like my job, Mom. And it’s in an office. I even have my own cubicle.” She digs her nail into a pimple on her forehead. “It’s really peaceful, actually.”

Her mother is probably leaning down in front of a hot oven, beads of sweat collecting on a wrinkled forehead. She is baking something that wafts a sweet smell into the living room where her elderly cat basks in the sun beside framed photographs of the family’s old beach house in Maine, of Megan graduating from college, of her lean frame in a sleek wedding dress.

There are pictures of Lucille, too, scattered along the edge of the doily-covered countertop, but they were taken when she was much younger. She has not accomplished anything important like her sister, who married and then died before she was thirty.

“Well, just think about it, okay?” her mother asks. “I worry about you, Lucy. I can’t lose…”

“Okay, Mom,” she interrupts. “I’ll think about it.”

As she bids goodbye, Lucille hears the oven door slam shut and paws scurry across wooden floorboards. She imagines her fetus sleeping atop her father’s lap as he sips beer on the couch.

Drops of precipitation land on its bald head. He erases them with a laugh and a gentle swipe of his thumb.

Joe kills himself on a Monday morning.

Her coworkers point to his name at the top of the newspaper’s daily “Obituaries” section. She glares at them from across the conference table until someone shoves it over to her awkwardly. Through the thick lens of her glasses, she squints down at the black-and-white type: Joseph Berman, 54, is survived by his mother, Sharon Berman, and his brother, Allan Berman.

When they spoke, she pictured him with a beer belly. He might have been bald with three or four wisps of hair stuck to the outside of his temples with gel. When he sat down on his recliner, the cushions shifted beneath his weight. Wine glasses trembled from the cabinets.

But in the photograph, Joe is lean, his legs thin and bony. He is smiling at the camera; his hands crossed under his head. He lies in the grass of a random backyard, or a park, or a field. He was handsome, even with the wrinkles etched under his eyes and the dark, pointed glow of his pupils.

It never occurred to Lucille to imagine Joe’s smile or his near-perfect white teeth. In the blank spaces of her memory, she must have conjured an image of rotting yellow.

The woman whose cubicle shares a corner with Lucille’s pats her on her shoulder. “It says the memorial’s on Thursday,” she says. “Are you going?”

“Maybe,” Lucille replies.

“You should,” the woman says. “You were, like, his friend. At the end, at least.”

“He wasn’t, like, your friend, right?’ Dana asks.

Lucille hands her the newspaper and points to the section she underlined in Sharpie. “I don’t know,” she says, “what even is a friend?”

Dana gasps and gestures to herself. “I’m your friend. You know, like, everything about me.” She stares down at Joe with a creepy, subdued smile. “And you also know I probably would’ve let your patient buy me a drink.”

“You would have slept with him,” says Lucille. “You would have ruined him.”

Dana sighs. “You’re being dramatic,” she says. “He could’ve ruined me, too.”

Lucille bites into a mushy banana and lets it sit on the edge of her tongue. Dana draws circles around Joe’s face with a manicured nail. They sit in silence, having nothing in particular to do.

By the time she finishes the banana, Lucille realizes she dislikes the fact that Dana saw Joe’s face the same day she finally did. Dana didn’t know him. Maybe Lucille didn’t, either— it’s impossible to know anyone over the phone. He didn’t know Lucille; Dana doesn’t, either. Maybe no one does.

Lucille doesn’t speak very much about important things.

To grapple with this unknowing, she drives to the edge of Seattle and lets her dead sister’s husband turn her over and fuck her in the ass.

“God,” he says. He lifts a hairy hand and slaps her lower back. She doesn’t tell him he missed his target. “You’re so fucking hot.”

“Are you inside?” she asks.

He comes before she can finish her sentence, his legs tensing and trembling. Then, with a gentler hand, he rubs her shoulders and squeezes one of her ears. His breath hits her neck in sour spurts.

“She never let me do that,” he whispers, positioning his body behind Lucille’s in a tight embrace.

She shuts her eyes and pretends he is a stranger she met at a bar. As he strokes the small of her back and drools into her ponytail, she pictures him sliding a gin and tonic over a long counter.

Would she give in and drink it like Megan did?

Lucille sat beside her sister four years ago when she met him at an Irish pub. Their unification was simple: His pool ball jumped over the table and landed in Megan’s lap. She cradled it in her palms and stared up at him with drunken wonder rimming her pupils.

For the rest of the night, Lucille downed lukewarm beer while she watched them press open-mouthed kisses onto each other’s necks, sneak away to the restroom, and stumble into the graffiti-covered walls.

But during Megan’s eulogy, he told everyone they had met through a mutual friend.

Lucille never asked him why he lied about something so trivial. She knew that their narrative was thick enough to be bent at its edges and still exist as a whole. After all, Megan was not there to confirm that the only thing that brought them together that night was shit luck.

Lucille was the one left to remember the pub and its piss-soaked bathroom stalls; she holds her memories beside her grief. It all tangles together in a web of mostly truths and little lies. It’s something tangible. She feels as if she can turn it over in her hands.

“I’m going to a memorial on Thursday,” she whispers into the dark. “Would you like to come with me?”

He answers with a guttural snore, which wakes his roommate’s Pomeranian, who then begins to howl in desperate vowels. Oooooo, it cries. Ohhhhh.

In her head, she joins in. She discovers that they are both creatures who can only scream when the whole city is asleep.

Dana drops her off in front of Joe’s mother’s house. “I can’t do funerals,” she says. “I cry like Kim Kardashian.”

“It’s a memorial.”

She gags. “Call me when it’s over.”

The house is a one-story with barred windows and broken shutters. The roof slants a little too far to the left; it makes Lucille wonder how long they’ve lived in fear of it caving in. She walks the gravel driveway and tramples overgrown weeds with her heels.

Soft music seeps beneath the crack of the front door. When she knocks, it swings open to reveal a pile of mail on the ground and a living room barren of guests. Cigarette smoke permeates stale air. From the small, tattered sofa, a cat stares up at her and bares its teeth.

“Hello?” she calls.

She takes a hesitant step through the entryway to find an old woman and a younger man. They sit at a table littered with ashtrays and crushed cans of beer, a deck of cards piled in the space between them.

The woman grins up at her. Her front two teeth are missing; the rest are a checkerboard of crooked yellows and browns. Her wiry hair is wrapped into a bun that perches atop her head.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Lucille says to the woman.

She takes a puff of a long cigarette and holds it out— a greeting, of sorts. “Are you Lucille?”

Lucille straightens her back. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Oh, call me Sharon,” she says. “And this—” she points to the man opposite her, “—is Allan.”

Lucille takes the third and last chair. It shakes beneath her weight.

Allan considers her with his grey eyes, an inscrutable gaze. She smooths her hands over her blouse and tries not to shrink.

“How did you know my name?” she asks.

Sharon clears a wad of phlegm from her throat and spits it into a tissue. “Joe never got around to introducing us, but any best friend of my son’s is a friend of mine.”

Before Lucille can react, the cat from the sofa leaps into her lap. He nuzzles his head against her breasts, purring softly. The vibrations of sound feel warm.

“Oh, he likes you,” Sharon says. “Doesn’t he, Allan?”

She watches him shuffle a set of cards, turning them over in his dirt-stained palms. They fall into each other in a seamless sheath. He doles out three piles and shoves one of them over to her.

“Gin rummy,” he says. “D’you know how to play?”

Glancing around the conjoined kitchen and living room, she knows that no one else will come. Still, she peeks down the hallway for mourners in the shadows, or pictures of Joe strung up on the walls. The only sorrow she finds is laced in her own reflection, illuminated against the smooth surface of a long black urn that sits on a dusty bookshelf.

She realizes she is meeting Joe for the first time. She stares into her own empty eyes and imagines they’re his. Beneath the table, she shakes hands with air.

“We’ll teach you,” Sharon says. She flips over the queen of hearts and smiles. “It’s not too hard.”

After four games, she excuses herself and steps outside. Cold air greets her bare ankles and elbows. The other houses lined up on the block are positioned away from this one, their wooden bodies basking in the glow of broken streetlights. She wonders when it would be appropriate to leave. Sharon retired to her bathroom to piss and smoke, tiredness hollowing her cheeks. No one is left in the kitchen, she thinks. It would be so easy to just—

“Why’d you show up?”

She spins around to find Allan. He leans his gangly torso against the railings of the porch, flicking a lighter with a calloused thumb.

“I wanted to share my condolences,” she says.

He takes a puff of his cigar and laughs, his voice catching in his throat. “You weren’t actually friends, right?” he asked. “Like, you met him at a bar once, and he harassed you into giving him your number?”

“Why do you think that?”

Allan blows smoke into the air, but he doesn’t cough. He gestures to the empty driveway. “‘Cause Joe never had any friends. No one knew him except for Ma and me.”

A sharp blade of anger lodges itself below her ribs. It scrapes up the inside of her neck and escapes through her mouth. “I knew him well enough to know that you must’ve gotten permission to come home from whatever rehab you landed yourself in this time.”

At her words, Allan takes a rickety step back. He opens his lips but doesn’t speak.

“And we were friends,” she continues. “The best of friends. We spoke every day, but he especially liked to call me when it rained because it reminded him of me. And— we weren’t just friends, either. We were lovers.” Her words rush out in a burst of energy. Her tongue tastes like metal. Somewhere, a dog is panting and attempting to speak. “We met at the pub on Hazel. His pool ball landed in my lap.”

“He never mentioned,” Allan says. He doesn’t look at her. “He would’ve told me.”

With a sharp yelp, Allan slams his beer bottle against the ground, purple veins bulging from his scarred wrists. Dark blood sprouts from his toes.

They stare at each other with open mouths. Inside the bathroom, Sharon coughs loudly, the harshness of it reverberating through the open air.

“That ain’t true.” Allan steps backward and stares into a grey sky. A flock of birds swarms above his head while, behind them,— just once— lightning strikes.

Hard rain falls, and Allan begins to weep, snot bubbles bursting from his nostrils onto the oil-stained front of his shirt. In the dim light of the sun’s departure, Lucille thinks he looks like Joe— the crinkles under his eyes, the dark points of his pupils.

“I’m pregnant with his baby,” Lucille mutters. She does not know why she says this. “It’s due in March.”

Dana skids her car into the driveway behind them, honking the horn twice. Over the low hum of the engine, Allan continues to blubber into his hands.

Lucille backs away, digging her heels once more into the dead weeds. “I’m sorry for your loss,” she says. “It’s so hard to lose… just— ” She stops, thinks. Takes a breath. Remembers the wet grass, the mailbox, the jab of her mother’s nails. “There’s never a clear reason.”

She climbs into the car. When they reverse, she gives his retreating figure a small wave through the mirror. He shrinks to the size of a pinprick.

They turn the corner, and he disappears from view.

“How was it?” Dana asks.

Lucille shrugs. “It was… peaceful.”

Lucille thinks about Allan and Sharon and the sad, empty memorial. She considers the futility of telling the truth when no one is alive to remember it. She remembers that everyone is predisposed to becoming ash.

She presses her hands to her stomach and searches for a sign of movement, willing the fetus to rearrange a limb or push against her womb. It’s old enough now to move on its own. She urges it to become angry and restless.

Finally, the fetus kicks. It’s all-consuming. It’s as powerful as a cough.

She sighs. Her breath fogs the window, blocking the world outside of it: the trunks of the trees, the dirt of the road, and the rain.

i.

I love her without symptom,

like fresh breath,

a drop into a bucket larger

than the bucket I had before.

It makes no sense;

again, these feelings are quite senseless.

When she grazes my cheek with

her thumb I float to a planet

untouched

by humanity and the devil,

or God, even.

This is to say I love with

a deflated chest and a head

hung to the ground.

I sink for her, or into her,

and when I love her I love everyone.

Maybe everything is a conduit. For

her, everything is a conduit.

It makes no sense.

When I pray, I murmur hymns

in the shape of a holy name

unwritten by the hands of any

man lost to time.

She creates time in the dip

of a smile;

she dissects God in the press

of a tongue to another.

ii.

Our apartment will shroud our bare bodies in sunlight. We will wake up holding elbows. Your cheek— the right one, closest to my mouth— will wear the surface of eyeliner I forgot to wipe off. We will slice bread in our underwear and realize we’ve forgotten to buy eggs. Then, we will walk to the corner store and wave at the man who calls us dykes beneath his breath. Your grandmother will call. You will lean your head on my shoulder and tell me you miss her, but she doesn’t quite know you anymore, and you remember when she taught you how to speak the language that claimed her well before the earth and the sky did. Later, I will tell you that I think you are beautiful when you sneeze. In the next breath, I will also tell you I am afraid of my own mortality, and we will lay on our backs with our arms slung in odd shapes between us: origamied and crumpled. Rest, you’ll say, close your eyes and listen to my voice. I’ll fall asleep to the notes you create with your mouth. I’ll dream of nesting birds with injured wings, and the pair of hands who scoop them up, place them into a cardboard box with lasers of sunlight poking in through wide, open spaces.

I recite this story now, because there are moments I wish I was a weapon, too. There are late nights spent stumbling home, drunk, from a party, nights when men step out of cars and cup my ass beneath my little black dress. Nights I stare at them, wild-eyed as a fawn, before running as fast as I can.

“How did you do it?” I ask her. “How did you force your body to fight?”

My mother shrugs. She holds a warm mug of tea to her chest. Our dog flanks the right side of her body; I lean against the left. We rub our socked feet together. All three of us sigh into early summer air.

“I didn’t have a choice,” she says, finally.

“Neither did I,” I say. “But I never fight. I just run.”

When my mother was seventeen, she broke a strange man’s nose.

She’d already dropped out of high school by then— too many fistfights, scrawny and angry, and hurting. Deep down. Her dream was to become a hairdresser, so that’s what she’d done. Her mother wasn’t angry at her for refusing to finish schooling; instead, she took another job to pay for cosmetology courses held in the basement of a YMCA.

My mother is not a violent woman. She sits on her armchair and crochets wide, colorful blankets. With calloused hands, now arthritic, she knots her love over and over. She bends down to water our aging plants rooted to the grass on our front lawn.

But in her one-bedroom in Queens, she didn’t have a choice to be soft. She didn’t have a chance to. Her softness melded to steel armor. Sometimes, she became a knife. A matchstick. The barrel of a handgun. Always smoking, never settled. She hadn’t bore any children yet— her womb was empty and her stomach growled with the hunger of youth.

When she broke that man’s nose, she was only trying to walk to the hair salon. Her boss, an old gay man with six ear piercings, paid her twenty dollars a day to shampoo the clients.

“They tipped well there,” she told me, “I gave my parents half of what I earned and I still had enough to buy Members Only jeans.”

So, she walked six blocks to work at eight in the morning. The sun held high in the air above her. She knew most of the inhabitants of the apartments she passed; she waved at them, flashing a friendly smile. They waved back. No one could help waving back, I’d imagine. She’s always been a focus of interest. Perhaps it’s her curly, full head of hair, or an upturned nose dotted with freckles.

(When I look in the mirror, I trace over myself with my eyes. Sometimes, I decide the only resemblance is the fire. It is hidden in our throats. You can only see it when we open our mouths.)

That morning, she didn’t see the man behind her. As she clicked her heels upon the cement, waving to the community that had grown to love her, he followed the imprints of her footsteps. He stepped inside of them and covered with them his own.

By the time she noticed the eclipsing shadow of the taller figure, his hands were already on her, cupping the bottom of her ass.

He whispered into her ear with a gruff voice. “Don’t fight, and I won’t hurt you.”

I can only imagine this next scene, as she never detailed how exactly he ended up face-first on the sidewalk, choking on his own blood.

I’d imagine she froze for a second, or nearly a second. Her main instinct has never been to fight— remember, she is not a violent woman. She’d trained herself to harden. On the inside, she was almost as scared as me.

Then, when she realized she’d have to turn to a weapon, she most likely jutted a sharp elbow into his ribs. She could have spun around and raised a fist to his face, or used the same elbow to crush the space between his dark eyes.

Either way, when he crumpled to the ground with a pained cry, a part of her wanted to weep.

I know this because, when she recites this story, she doesn’t speak about the violence. She doesn’t describe the sound cartilage  makes when it shatters. She doesn’t pause to relish in the power she held in her joints and wrists, how she threw a grown man to the ground and stood above him as he cried.

She wasn’t arrested. The neighbors around her served as witnesses to the grope. Those she greeted every morning ran to her aid; one held her and another dialed the police.

I recite this story now, because there are moments I wish I was a weapon, too. There are late nights spent stumbling home, drunk, from a party, nights when men step out of cars and cup my ass beneath my little black dress. Night I am too drunk and fall into bed with someone I’ve never spoken a word to before. Mornings I wake up and soak my sheets in bleach before throwing them into the dumpster and wiping my red, stinging hands.

“I’m not strong enough,” I tell her. “I’ve never been strong enough to handle it.”

“Handle what?”

“Everything,” I say. “Men, mostly. But the world, too.”

“You’re so young,” she says. “You have time.”

Time unspools around us. It always does— when I cannot get out of bed, time is the only force that nudges me forward. But time does not do anything but place a gentle hand on my shoulder. In ten years, I wonder if I’ll be reciting the same tired words to the base of her neck. I wonder if I’ll shed the same tired tears and stain her shirt with the same tired powerlessness.

I know I’m my mother’s daughter; I know, deep within myself, I contain the potential to become a knife. But I can’t help but think I’d revel, just a tiny bit, at the bloodshed I leave in my wake.

So maybe the softness is more crucial than the sharpness. Maybe an open palm holds more power than the tip of an elbow. Maybe my mother did have a choice, and she merely decided to walk away from violence with her arms outstretched towards a distant, fragmentary sun.

Tonight, we sit together and choose to hold hands across the table. When she smiles, I can’t help but smile back, even though I’m still crying.

I tell them she is doom-scrolling on Reddit and picking at a loose hangnail. Four days ago, she willed away an infection on her thumb that tinted the skin purple. Now, she is wishing she’d maintained the sting, or perhaps remembered it well enough to greet it again, phantomed and pulsing.

She is posing nude in front of a dusty mirror. One hand is elegantly perched on top of her left breast; the other is holding the camera. Her thighs are spread, but she is not to be consumed. She is not an invitation. Between her legs, where the camera flashes, she is weeping.

She is meeting friends for drinks and ordering too many tequila sodas. She can’t taste them— but she does not indulge in anything for the taste, or the smell, or the feel. Instead, she is tipping her head back and swallowing the cup’s empty air. She is pretending she is eating the sun, and that light is bouncing down her throat and swirling around her esophagus. She is wishing to be light. She is wondering where all the light hides in the dark.

When her mother calls, she is answering with tight lips. No, she isn’t feeling bad right now. Yes, she still feels bad sometimes. No, she does not want to talk about it anymore. Goodnight, she loves you, she hopes you sleep well.

She is allowing a stranger to choke her during sex. When she turns blue, she does not tap their shoulder and ask for mercy. She is opening her mouth and making noiseless, futile sounds.

She is laughing with a stranger. She is stopping on the sidewalk to let a dog sniff the tips of her fingers. She is buying flowers for her lover. She is reading novels written by authors who flung their bodies into the river and let their words remain immortal and untouchable and innocent. She is thinking about time. She is thinking about time.

She is counseling a friend, in the dark, in the middle of a busy street, in the light of a sunrise. She is telling a friend she is scared, too. She is telling a friend their bodies are ghosts. She is telling a friend they are perfect, even after, even then, even now. She is twining hands and arms. She is connecting the bones of the dead.