It’s Sunday afternoon, and a roadrunner has found its way into the backyard, under the gate and onto the patio, where I’m reading in the sun. Its tailfeathers bob up and down as its regal head swivels, surveying the land, from the immediate gilded steps to the wilting hibiscus tree to the bone dry fountain afar. Little colonizer, or little refugee, returning. Once satisfied, having scoped out its domain, it ambles over to the fence and begins nibbling at a cluster of grapes slung low on their vines.

It takes a few minutes for the bird to notice me, sitting on a towel in the sun, but when I stand up to compete myself sweet and sick for the fruit, my shadow glances over its beautiful speckled body, and it startles. We stare at each other for a moment, this bird and I, both frozen in a sudden awareness of our fragility — my soft, naked, clumsy feet; the bird’s tiny heart and its fine-boned neck. Slowly, carefully, I reach for a grape from the highest vine that dangles in my periphery, and when the bitter, dusty skin pops open in my mouth, my tongue delights in a burst of warm, fleshy jam.

We work our way through a vine or two, then, this bird and I, from bottom-to-top and top-to-bottom respectively, gorging ourselves with grapes finally burnt purple and ripe from the sun. Then I retreat from the yard, leaving the roadrunner alone, and the next day, all that’s left of the bird are a few stray feathers caught between two slats of fence.

An infinite, irreversible combination of choices and miracles brought me to this moment, but for all my late-spring gratitude and wonder, these days I feel as though the string of divine memory — my tie to something greater and holy, to human connection and to purpose — gets thinner with each passing shriek of a plane overhead.

The other day, I was walking to the grocery store when a homeless man standing by the curb reached out towards me with a gloved hand, eyes wide, saying something I couldn’t quite catch. For a moment, I forgot that it was a Monday afternoon and most people were still at work, that I was alone, a girl, and not just a girl but a girl in spaghetti straps and short-shorts, I forgot that this place isn’t like Philadelphia, that you’re not supposed to acknowledge that you see them, and I paused, and I approached him, and I asked him what he’d said. My fingers are real, he repeated, and at that point I noticed that his eyes had been vacant but now decidedly were not; his hand had not been reaching at first but now… maybe. I was suddenly nervous, and when I think about it in retrospect I still get nervous, and this makes me feel so ashamed. So are mine, I replied cheerily, but then I quickly hurried away, cursing my stupid lack of common sense and survival instincts. He followed me down a block or two before getting distracted by the contents of a trash can, and then I was cursing myself for a whole plethora of other reasons. I don’t think I’m a good person. The reality of someone else’s suffering could not outweigh the potential for suffering that I’d envisioned for myself. I walked as quickly as I could into the grocery store and waited there for ten minutes longer than I probably needed to, shivering in the produce aisle, negotiating in my head. I don’t think I could give him food, but I can take the same street back home, I thought. I don’t even need to be brave. I just wish I could be less afraid.

When I imagine the caricature of a grassroots pacifist in my head, all I can think of is a man. I think that’s probably because of Jesus. I thought I’d left God behind in high school, but a summer alone in the high desert does strange things to a person. I find myself wishing I was more like Jesus, compassionate and brave the way only men seem to be able. Jesus wouldn’t be wearing spaghetti straps and short-shorts.

I’ve been dreaming about dying lately, except, that’s not true. I haven’t been dreaming. Lately, just before I fall asleep, I’ve been remembering what’s coming, and that I don’t know what it will be like. Then I drift off into nothing, and I’m not scared because I assume it isn’t forever. That’s the scary part, I think. Not the unknown, but the forever of it.

Another artifact from high school is math, even the most abstract, softest forms of it. Recently, though, I’ve been visualizing vectors. I’ve been thinking about how we all exist in some crazy dimension with more axes than we can manage, that offer some infinite number of points to land on, but we can only choose one to land on at a time. The fullness of a life looks like a rubber band ball, a jumble of lines from point to point, but it will never be solid. We can never have everything. At some point, we stop choosing, and we stay there.

But that’s dying, and I’m not scared of that right now. I’m not writing about the end, just another thing ending. I’m at the brink of my 20s, the decade of frenzied choosing, and I have never met anything enslaved by forever. We can only have most things once — like nineteen, like childhood, like college — but we keep having more things after. The consequences of our choices are still conditions we get to live in.

Last week, I set a honey and bleach trap in the discarded lid of a yogurt container in a futile attempt to make a dent in the swarming colony of ants that seem to have made a home in my kitchen cabinet. The label on the bottle of bleach I found under the bathroom sink read WARNING: CORROSIVE, and I wondered if it’s a good idea to put a substance that can kill both the insects and myself so close to all of the dishes and cutlery we’d both been eating from.

The ants were too smart to take the bait, but I started to get terrible headaches from inhaling the open fumes every time I went to the kitchen to eat, and at night I wondered if I’d accidentally eaten off of a contaminated plate. Maybe I’m going to die. It was only when I contemplated my own death that I realized I was the one trying to kill things, mixing up a concoction of ant-genocide of my own volition. I threw out the honey trap and the headaches subsided, and now I wake up every day grateful that the unknown isn’t forever yet.

A little more than a year ago but still in July, I read this piece by a person admittedly a handful of years ahead of me, who was also thinking about endings, and I wrote this part down:

We’ve all been drafted into the army of the real — but where is the real? A small bit of time goes so slow, a lot goes so quick; the search becomes desperate and the tightrope feels thinner. Time moves in a circle; but age moves in a straight line.

I’m about to be twenty, and that isn’t much, but age is a straight line, no matter how short. I can never get the years back. I have less and less time to get it right, to find it, to tell you what it is. I still have more time than other people, but less time than the kids, and the rope only gets shorter. I didn’t realize that when I left home at seventeen, it would be for the last time. These days, I feel listless and insignificant, my writing irrelevant, and “home” is a nebulous concept I must piece together anew to fit around my changed body and changed soul, rather than return to. I can never get the home back, the first one, the childhood one.

When I flew west, I was finally tired of the parties and the talking, the eating and drinking, the groggy nocturnal monotony. No more fevers, I swore, no more crying. No more writing strange metaphors to avoid writing about sex. I promised myself I’d do yoga and only drink my weed. I spent the summer hollowing out. But when I go back to Philadelphia, I’ll be a Dixie Cup in a flood of influence again. What have I accomplished to contribute to the ocean? All I have learned about myself is that alone, I am not Jesus; I get so uncomfortable being brave.

Almost twenty, tangled in floss webbing has-beens, a cluster of two-dimensional choices suspended in a vast realm of could-haves, burning like skin, I am burning like orange horizon. I wonder if this is sunrise or sunsetting. I wonder when I will finally be able to pinpoint for certain when I was at my brightest, how I will greet the dimming from which I’ll know that I can never return. I wonder whether this is the open or the close, wonder why the beginning and the end of a path through the sky has to be the most beautiful, why no one can bear to look at the sun at high noon in it’s burning glory, pure and stainless, I wonder.

Sometimes, I still think awful things. I drive through this hometown archipelago of monuments to feeling — the only thing I still remember about high school, how it made me feel — and I get this tug in my chest, a longing to go back. The piece of me that carries bad habits like scars, that still can’t block phone numbers or stop writing about it, any of it, lurches home. I don’t really know where closure comes from. It hasn’t come. That isn’t to say I’m still stuck on everything, just some things, some times. It was awful, but it sure felt good every now and then. The best a high schooler ever could’ve felt.

But old friends — ex-friends, actually — people I grew to dislike so much since leaving this small town because I’d once liked them so much while I was knee-deep in it, have started reaching out to me again. I want to forgive them, or maybe I want them to forgive me. It has been such a long time since we fought and forgot to make up. I am so tired of remembering how to be angry, cutting myself open again and again each time. When it comes to most ordinary harms, I’ve realized, we don’t get to choose whether we heal or not. The body just keeps trying to repair itself so we can go on living, and that’s a beautiful thing, more beautiful than any open wound.

I haven’t had time to sit down and write for a while, which is evidence of an abundance — practically, an excess — of good things. Sophomore spring was very good to me. What a privilege it was to be busy! What a privilege to be invited, to be relied on, to have homework, to eat together, to have responsibilities, to be trusted, to make other people laugh, to share, to give gifts, to hug tightly, to get angry, to forgive, to have to leave, to miss— to miss. What a privilege it is to grieve a good thing. I sit at my high school desk now and feel all kinds of bittersweet, finally having realized the best version of sadness.

Sometimes, I thought I wasn’t doing enough, and still, sometimes, I thought I couldn’t possibly do it all. Even scurrying between engagements, I used to look at my friends and feel that they were all much more interesting than me. Then I made more friends who thought my old friends weren’t interesting at all, and I realized there is no hierarchy of involvements, and there never has been. Every odd dish has a place in the cupboard. I want to go back in time and tell my eighteen- and seventeen- and sixteen-year-old self, The world is so wide and full of people who are so ready to love you. I’d only found a few back then. I’m finding more of them now. I’ll keep finding them for the rest of my life, I suspect, as will you. How lucky are we?

I made senior friends just to lose them and freshman friends who will outstay me, and I realized just how much I would miss my roommates when I was standing in the empty living room of 2314 for the last time, knowing we would never get this back ever again. There will be no more late-night shower monopolies or homemade Korean food left on the stove for anyone to eat, no weekly text in Wet and Gushy (formerly Stone Cold, formerly 3 Koreans and a Chinese, formerly Roomies!) that we’re out of eggs, no family-size bag of Snyder’s Buffalo Wing pretzels destroyed in one sitting between four girls who were all once afraid of eating. The door perpetually left bolted open for visits from one— no, two— no, three boyfriends is not ours anymore.

It’s okay. There’s beauty in moving forward. Sometime in April or maybe early May, I asked Devon which semester of college has been his favorite so far. He said, This one. They just keep getting better. He’s absolutely right. In the grand scheme of things, it only gets better.

I am four glasses deep in a puddle of a night, stumbling down
a set of side stairs to an open window and
a cigarette for afters. Last semester,
a girl in my creative writing class wrote an essay about turtles, about
how they have never known their mothers. About how
when they are born, they crawl towards the brightest thing they can see
and hope it is the moon—
guiding them to open ocean. Somewhere,
it has rained, and there is a puddle underneath a porch light, and
a turtle is sure it has found its way home.

When I was fifteen, a boy in my biology class taught me that
the moon pulls the tides. I am thinking about him because
I am thinking about how
even when a turtle reaches open ocean,
it is still being moved by the moon.
I am wondering what kind of tide exists under porch lights, then. Really,
I am wondering about the way J begged me to kiss him at a string 
of basement parties that summer, and the way the inside
of my body was the only thing he knew about me, and whether
that was and will be the only water I deserve,
having grown up with parents who never, ever touched.

I was born under an August blue moon.
When my mother looked into the sky that night, did she know
it would always be a window and never
a mirror? I was raised in a town less than two hours from the shore,
but in my house, there has never been a thing like the ocean.
At what point do the turtles that follow porch lights realize
they are killing themselves
hiding in puddles?

I am four glasses and half of a cigarette deep,
and you are looking out the window, and I am looking at you.
The night keeps going and going, and I have never been this kind of honest
before. I spent years thinking I could love a puddle into ocean
but these days, I am dreaming in shades
of navy blue, waking up to a million
alarms in the morning and thinking about gratitude,
dots of snow melting into black hair, gentle wrists,
country music, the bed of a pick up truck,
shoulder blades, Valentine’s Day
birthday boy peeling oranges, stringing up flowers—
and How lucky am I. 

I am thinking,
Most people don’t get it right the first time,
and I loved my mother as much as I could, but
when she was adored it was always as a mother
and never as a wife, and more and more
turtles these days mistake porch lights for moon, and
I quit smoking every other Saturday morning for the past two months, and really,
I do not know
what the ocean is supposed to look like, but I am starting to suspect
it could be something like this.

Everyone around me — the tarot card ladies online and the pilates advertisements on the streets of Ulsan and my mother bustling around making laundry to clean —seems to say this is the time to start over. I want to tell them I already did, in May when I said goodbye and did not call, over and over again in late August with new hellos to old friends, then in September every time I crossed the street, with every first bite of a sandwich, every club application I finally wrote with honesty, that one night in December when I saw a thread and thought to tug it. This is enough for me for now. I play the new year like a game, superstitious just because it gives me something to do with my lighter and my hands and my mouth, twelve grapes in the last minute of 2025 and another twelve for the first of 2026, just in case, because everything on the internet says something different but this year if I believe in anything it’s that I’m gonna be fucking lucky. My mom only gets through ten grapes before 12:01. All precious things only come into your life once, but the years keep coming and coming. It’s okay, Mama, we can always try again.

She almost bumps her head on the edge of the table when she emerges into what she hopes will be a good year, despite the grapes and her last scrap of wish paper refusing to catch on fire, the laundry still tumbling with five minutes left in the cycle, but my hand is there to catch the curve of her skull. In less than two weeks, my hands will be in Philadelphia again. She will be in a house in Maryland full of tables and empty chairs with sharp corners. As women age, they bruise more easily. I can’t forget it.

My father runs into the room and calls me baby, and I am frightened by the word. It’s worse than daughter. Last week, as he slumped over a beer in the dim light of the last bar standing between me and the apartment I am briefly calling home, he told the whole table of his coworkers and their children and my mother that he’d wished for one more, a son. I will not make jokes anymore, about being so perfect my parents decided they didn’t need another. I wish for love, my mother wishes for a good year, and he wished for a son. I wish for love. He wrestles his arm around my neck and calls it a hug.

We pop a cork off a bottle of champagne, and I am handed a glass more than half-full. We toast to 2026 with our glasses more than half-full. There is something undeniably good in this, except the drink is bitter and I want to go to bed, and I say so. My father frowns, and after a beat of consideration, he tells me that if I am ever depressed, I should tell him. I blink stupidly at him. We have had this conversation before, just a week ago, on Christmas day. It ruined my holiday then, and despite my posturing about a soft entry into 2026, I find myself panicking that this will ruin my year. My father soldiers ahead. He tells me depression isn’t so bad if you fix it quickly, and he can fix it if I talk to him. I want to go to bed. My mother clutches a glass of bubbles and agrees with him, tells me I can tell her anything, and my right hand is still cupped like it is reaching for her head, but I am thinking of high school and every time I tried to carve my skin open to prove there was something good inside my body. I am remembering how she watched me do it. Well, I have started over a million times since then. I tell my parents I am not depressed, and my mother reminds me I have never been. I beg fifteen-year-old Christine for forgiveness and do not disagree. Then my father asks for my MBTI and determines that I could not have depression anyway because I am not a feeler. I think, and then I stop because the thinking is the problem, isn’t it? Then I am laughing so hard champagne burns behind my eyes.

Pushing one o’clock, I am flushed and wondering who I get it from. I have not gone to bed. I drink a glass of red wine, and then another, and another, because my father keeps pouring and does not let me say no. He toasts to everything: good health (my hip has been catching again, but I haven’t told anyone yet), my college admissions (which happened more than two years ago, but I guess I haven’t done anything worthy of much praise since), the 4.0 GPA I’m not even sure I’ve maintained after an abysmal string of finals, a merry Christmas, a happy New Year, a wedding anniversary. My mother counts on her fingers and concludes they are on year twenty-eight.

Four nights ago in a hotel on the west coast of the peninsula, I asked my father how he proposed to my mother. Drunk on convenience store soju, he chewed his lip and concluded that he didn’t. My mother invited him to meet her parents, and my grandfather basically proposed for him.2 My mother, also inebriated, turned pink with laughter as my father reenacted the scene. Allegedly, in Korean culture back then, it was uncommon to pop the question with a nice ring and one knee. But when my father stumbled onto both of his in that hotel room and clutched my mother at the waist and thanked her, profusely, for agreeing to marry him, I couldn’t help but feel that he knew she deserved better. I observed him crouched, laughing through his gratitude, and my mother patting him on the head, her eyes half moons I have inherited that mean she is really smiling, and I wondered if that was the closest portrait to affection I’d ever be able to paint. That was the first time he’d ever knelt for her. I had to laugh with them because if I didn’t, I’d have ruined their night.

I hate this 2022 Bordeaux, but we can’t get it in the States because of the stupid tariffs, or so my mother claims. My father tips the last slosh in my glass straight down my throat though I am just going in for a sip, and when I cough, he scolds me for not appreciating it enough. Then he dabs my lip with a tissue and starts thinking out loud, a familiar dialogue. Aren’t I the best tour guide? Don’t you love Korea? He will hit me if I don’t say yes, yes, probably on the arm or maybe the back, though he will never do it with true hate in his heart. He does it laughing, after I snark at him or call myself beautiful. I take it better than I take the doors slamming or the plates clattering in the sink, though it is all the same reflex towards anger, even the play-version.

Maybe I am the one spoiling the new year. I think I’m grossly misrepresenting what’s on my mind at the moment, anyway. I am so glad to have this life, exactly as I know it. It is the only one I’ve ever known and the only one I will get to live, and that is such a privilege. I look at my parents and I feel something twinge, somewhere fragile and tender, in the milky eardrum of my heart, that this unique blend of circumstances is so precious and rare. That I have people at all is such a blessing, and these are my people, who have furnished my memories with comfort and discomfort, who have showed me how to be good and taught me that I must be better. How lucky am I, to witness their tangled minds and in every knot see myself. How safe must I feel, to hate my home sometimes and still call it my home.

I think now of my mother, who on her twenty-eighth wedding anniversary in that hotel in Gwang-ju, after being thanked by her husband for the first time in almost three decades for her service as a wife, looked out the window at the setting sun with her entire nuclear family at her back and started crying. She cries much more these days, and I am old enough to pretend it doesn’t still frighten me. Maybe she cries exactly because I am now old enough, and I do not need her to be unbreakable; I need her to be human. Maybe I am selfish, even in my considerations, making my mother’s life and her emotions entirely about my wants and needs.

I brushed her tears away while my father poured himself another drink and asked her, exasperated, why she could possibly be crying. He has less patience for miserable people when he is drunk and primed to be happy. She blubbered out something like, Did I make the wrong choice? This is her classic opening line. This is what tortures her. For a while, I thought that choice was me, but since four nights ago, I’m starting to suspect it might have more to do with my father. That night, as usual, he told her not to say that, not to think that. He doesn’t hit her like he hits me, but he didn’t have any part in making her body, so maybe he feels less ownership over its aches. He handed her another glass of soju. Then, confirming my suspicions, she asked the question that casts a perpetual shadow over our family, though her articulation of it is a bit different than mine. Why didn’t you ask me to go back to Korea with you?

He told her, You’re stubborn, and you wouldn’t have gone even if I’d asked. I was suddenly reminded of every argument in every romantic comedy ever, where the male love interest doesn’t understand why the female lead is crying, because why would he ask her The Question3 if he already knows what she’s going to say? And she keeps crying and saying, But you should’ve at least asked.

Except this wasn’t a movie, so I asked my mother if she would’ve gone. No, I wanted you to grow up in America. Something in me, something soft and full of air that I have been carrying all my life, struck a needle then and has been deflating ever since. It has more to do with my father, her tears, but there is still a bit of it that is my fault. See! my father exclaimed. So why would I ask if I knew you’d stay? I asked my father why he didn’t just stay with us, and he said his plan was always to go back to Korea after he finished his PhD program in the States. Was I a part of the broader plan, which is his life? Or was his gaze always narrow, his path to America one devoted to education? If he wanted me in the first place— regardless of whether I was a daughter or a son— in America, did he plan to leave my mother here to raise me from the start?

There are so many things I still do not understand about my parents. I have inherited their habits— the way my mother pokes her feet out from the blankets even in the dead of winter because they get hot, my father’s tendency to wander off without a glance over his shoulder— but I do not want to retrace their mistakes. I do not want to end up in a hotel on the west coast of America someday asking myself if I made the wrong choice. I do not want to search my husband’s face for compassion and find a stranger’s discomfort. But my parents don’t want that for me either. The story of my family always comes back to the difference between good and better.

What else is new? Besides the year, which isn’t even really completely born yet. In America, my friends are just starting their days, their last days of a year I’ve allegedly already departed from, and yet we are breathing in tandem. 2025 and 2026 briefly sharing the world. The bucket of fried chicken I had for dinner last night— last year— is just sitting in the trashcan with the grapevine and a few corks and at least one of my fingernails, which I’ve chewed off in the past hour. Nothing is clean or fresh and it doesn’t have to be. I am not sure if I am loving what I love just yet, but I am basking in the soft animal of my body, so maybe Mary Oliver would still be proud of me for getting halfway to her idea.

I am off to bed. Maybe when I wake up my room will be cold and my eyes will be dry and I will realize I could probably count the words I’ve said in this new year. But even saying this has got me confused because it’s an arbitrary threshold, the boundary between last and this year, and if my friends didn’t pass through it at the same time as I did, it can’t be a very sacred threshold at all.

If I were to briefly buy into the conceit of a Big New Start, I would confess I’ve been worried this year might swallow me whole. But maybe just the first four months will, or the last two, or maybe it’ll be the last weekend of July. I’ll tell you what it’ll really be— it’ll be alright. Time is arbitrary, and the throat is just a tunnel.

Happy New Year! If this exact moment doesn’t feel good, that’s okay. It’s not your whole year. You can have an orange and start over as you split the peel into a flower, start over again as you pull apart the slices, start over as your teeth break the first wedge’s skin, and start over and start over and start over. And if this moment does feel good, have an orange anyway. There is still the possibility, the hope, that the next moment will be better.

Everyone comes home on different things, holding different bags. It is pushing three o’clock in the morning now and I am chain smoking out my window, flicking ash twenty-three stories down the high rise. Behind me, a room full of shiny, chapped lips and heads lolling over. My bedroom is a runway. Outside clothes all over my pillowcase, the night going, and going. Everyone I used to know is probably sleeping, or at least touching themselves. Here, someone promises me a party in my mouth. It is whipped cream from my fridge, and I pop it off my wrist and catch it. Cheers, and spinning, and spinning. I will fall asleep on the couch in about two hours, having said nothing at all of import, and wake up to find three people sardined and spooning in my bed. I will smell this night forever. The joys of hosting afters.

What else? I’ve been dreaming about long walks down the Schuylkill, having my religious crisis out loud in the middle of the night. I’ve been thinking, there is nothing stopping me from just picking a direction and walking away forever. Sitting on a bench under a starless sky, all the bright lights fallen and twinkling from city windows, I wish for answers to come in the form of a person. Symbiosis. I want a new muse who understands what I am doing with him.

I’ve been dreaming about November and the three months after and nothing else. A flx4 balanced across knees, a short film about grieving. Two people trapping the last of stillness on a crowded street. A mother explaining how everything should be, which is only better. The film bleeding out and my life bleeding in. If I hadn’t been so standoffish then, would we be friends now? I speak pretty shit Korean. I write pretty good English. A braid of colors on a legal pad, tracing a month of stops and starts. T. Silverman writing nothing on my final draft but You are a writer. I will never publish that piece here, but I would read it to anybody who asks. This is my pointless project, the writing. Like praying, but maybe with slightly better chances that someone will answer. I’m forcing my hand.

These transient clusters assembled by matriline freckle the global ocean. Hunting for dozens of miles each day, killer whales trace paths only their matriarch knows to follow, following currents only their matriarch knows will change. Like tuxedoed bullets, they surge forward on the furious up-and-down of their tail flukes in a remarkable display of hydrodynamic locomotion. Killer whales can beat their flukes and cut through water at over thirty-five miles per hour.

Their bodies are sleek cathedrals of muscle, wrapped in skin a disproportionate mere fifteen millimeters thick. Without her additional layer of blubber, a killer whale’s rubbery epidermis would be thin enough to shred into ribbons. In most cases, killer whales’ scars come from each other, from playful nibbles or nipping that says “get back here!” just before mating. In rarer cases, they come from deep, hateful bites or from dragging each other’s limp bodies to the surface so they can breathe. These scars can last a lifetime.

Every pod inherits different methods of hunting from their matriarch, as unique as the dialects of echoes and clicks they use to communicate. In the North Pacific, killer whales corral wild salmon into shimmering globes of silver scales, then slap the surface with their flukes to stun them. In Antarctic waters, they charge in unison at ice floes, generating waves that spill over the edges and sweep seals into the sea. Off the coast of Norway, they circle herring into tight orbs, flashing their white bellies to dazzle the school before striking. Along Patagonia, killer whales often beach themselves deliberately, lunging onto sand to snatch sea lions from the shore, their bodies thrashing against earth before sliding back into the surf.

Not every hunt is for hunger, however. Sometimes killer whales go after prey just for the thrill, for the sake of movement, proving mastery, or most often, to play. They toss porpoises into the air like volleyball setters, toy with seabird piñatas until feathers litter the ocean surface, slap the life out of stray salmon and then balance them on their heads like hats. News outlets capturing pods of salmon-clad killer whales call this last one a “fashion trend,” like low-rise jeans or chunky pendants.

News outlets also cover killer whale funerals.

Unlike humans, killer whales must make the conscious choice to breathe. Every few minutes, they force their bodies to the surface for air, their exhales explosions of salty breath that can reach three hundred miles an hour. Even in sleep, one half of a killer whale’s brain stays awake to remember to breathe. Mothers nudge their newborn calves upward the moment they enter the world, pushing them towards the air on the crests of their rostrums. Their lives begin with the effort of surfacing.

When a calf dies, this instinct persists. Again, the mother brings it to the surface, pressing her nose beneath the small, limp body and holding it to the air. Sometimes she carries the calf for days, even weeks, bobbing at the surface as if her child might finally inhale if she waits long enough.

Killer whale pregnancies last fifteen to eighteen months. A pregnant whale moves differently through the water, her body tilting with a gentler hinge at each stroke. She ascends in long, steady spirals rather than bursts, and the water parts around her like she’s towing a small moon beneath her ribs. She eats almost constantly in the later months, consuming enough salmon or seals to sustain both herself and the calf rolling and unfurling inside her. Other females in the pod often flank her as she travels, falling back in the pod and adjusting their pace to hers. When the calf is finally born, tail-first in a rush of red water, the mother stays pressed against it, gathering it into the crook of her body.

In 2018, a mother named Tahlequah carried her dead newborn for seventeen days and nearly a thousand miles through the Salish Sea. Other whales in her pod followed, vocalizing in long, low moans that rippled across the water. After finally releasing her calf, Tahlequah lingered for hours, circling the spot where it sank. When she surfaced for air, it was with great difficulty one might have called hesitation.

My mother kept vigil over Tahlequah during the weeks that she graced the news, scouring the web for clips of the devastated whale and reading me articles on her capacity for grief every night before bed. I started dreaming in deep blues, a great weight that I could not lift bearing down on my back. When I was a child, my mother would carry me inside the house if I fell asleep in the car. She said a mother will always be strong enough to bear her child’s weight. It is hard to be eleven and for the first time, afraid of drowning. My mother also told me killer whales’ brains have a more elaborately folded limbic system than ours, carving emotions and memory and urges into nerve-masses the size of a watermelon. We sat in our backyard one evening, the sky the color of bruised plums, mosquitoes bumping lazily against citronella candle flames, and I learned the human brain is no larger than a grapefruit. “A grapefruit,” she said, making a fist and holding it between us. She tapped the side of my head with her knuckles. “That’s all you get.” Neuroscientists suspect that killer whales feel more deeply than humans can imagine.

One afternoon last summer, sitting on our outdoor patio, my aunt Jen held my mother’s hand over port wine and chocolate almonds, and she told us both that long before she had Montana, she’d almost had a son. “I would’ve called him Jett,” she said. “I cried when my body killed him.” To that, my mother toasted her and reached for me, eyes glassy. “You have no idea,” she said, “how many times I tried to have you.”

The name “killer whale” began as a mistranslation. 18th century Basque sailors called them “asesinas de ballenas,” which means “whale killers,” after watching them harry blue whales and finbacks, attacking in coordinated flurries until the great carcasses rolled over and sank. Though once a title of admiration, over time the words inverted, as did the meaning, which by the 20th century had shifted to one of blame.

These days, my mother doesn’t need to lift me, and I don’t think she still can. Her hair, once inky black, now shimmers with threads of white, and she has stopped offering me nickels to pluck them all out. She still tells everyone she has a black thumb, but over the summer she bought a basil plant at the farmers market anyway, just to see if things can change. It has been a few months, and it’s still alive on our kitchen windowsill.

2. Which is to say I was radicalized by a way of being and a state of doing— and that quality, that practice, was loving— remarkable as it is for being so precious and still so available.

3. Like water falling, shapeless until it finds a vessel.

4. All the world is a shelf, and on it we are jars and vases and bowls.

5. When I was in first grade, I wrote my first Father’s Day card. A template printed on construction paper, waiting on my desk after recess. My dad is…

6. Father’s Day Card, circa 2011:

My dad is… far away.

My dad is… My mommy is caring.

My dad is… My mommy is smart.

My dad is… My mommy is always there for me.

My dad is… My mommy is loving.

7. Korea, in July, for the first time in twelve years: I climb stairs carved into boulders pressing towards the sky like thumbs. Rope paths strung between them span over the frothy crush of the Pacific, ashen-blue waves flushing white as they embrace the jagged coast. I am seventeen yet infantile in my newness to this world. My father, close behind me, points to the horizon and gives it a different name in a language I am only just beginning to understand. In my wonder, I am careless. I lean over the rope railing as if to reach for the edge of the sea, and the wind pitches me further forward until I am weightless, stomach dropping, hair a blaze of blackness feathering my periphery. Before I can tumble and snap my body on the rocks, my father— who does not touch— grabs me by the shoulders and pulls me away from the path’s edge, his voice alarmed as he wraps his arms tightly around me and asks me what I think I’m doing. I am loving this, I want to say. I am loving Korea, and now, you.

8. In 1958, a woman named Mildred Jeter married her childhood sweetheart, Richard Loving, in a courthouse in Washington D.C. Interracial marriage had not technically been legalized in D.C. at the time, but it also wasn’t prohibited by explicit laws as it was in other states. The Lovings returned to their home in Virginia without a honeymoon. Following an anonymous tip, police arrested them in their bedroom in the middle of the night.

9. The Lovings were sentenced to a year in prison for miscegenation, suspended only if they left Virginia for twenty-five years.

10. The way loving sometimes requires leaving home.

11. This is not my way of equating race and nation, but my attempt to say that both are drawn boundaries trying to make strangers out of people who might otherwise have been family.

12. The Lovings moved to D.C. in 1959 and lived there for four years with Mildred’s cousin and his wife before deciding to appeal their case. It was 1963, and they missed Central Point. They missed their small town with its wide skies and poplar trees that just grew and were not planted. They missed Virginia sunsets that stained the wildflower fields golden and the streets disappearing with gentle curves around familiar buildings that had never existed on a grid. They missed their neighbours in soft clothes, who looked like Mildred and Richard both. They’d had two children together who had never known this home.

13. In a unanimous decision issued on June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Lovings, striking down state laws banning interracial marriage. When they moved back to Virginia, Richard Loving built his family a house.

14. My mother watches me slam my head against the kitchen floor again, her eyes unforgiving. I scream at her, and the sound is animal, and I am animal, my hands and knees scrabbling on the linoleum printed like tile. She uses a foot to push me away, her fingers still clutching my bottle of little white pills. Clothes I’ve been packing for college are strewn around the room, my suitcase flung open in a corner like a slack-jawed mouth post-gagging. I throw my body towards the sharp handle of a kitchen cabinet. My mother doesn’t flinch, says she would rather watch me kill myself this way. Faintly, I register a trickle of blood running down my temple, and heavy footsteps stumbling closer. I rear my head back again, but a hand catches my forehead before it finds pain, cradles my face. My father’s clumsy fingers press to my lips, and the voice that has been screeching, I hate you; I hate you, finally quiets. “She is trying,” he whispers in stilted English. “Sometimes the loving way is not the right way.”

15. In grammar, the present continuous describes an action still in progress.

16. The present perfect requires an action to have already passed.

2:12 am

little playlists for every occasion but instead they’re just thoughts. writing like a celebrity with a secret blog they know everyone has found and will certainly read, and read into. read into this. i have two songs on my mind: fuck me eyes and party 4 u. driving home from seeing him except i don’t do that anymore it’s just familiar hurt. nostalgia but without the satisfaction or gold tint and all the ache. old music arouses. but get it right: i miss it because he is my muse and not because i loved him, just his shell. a space for a centerpiece always calling in absent but in a good and reliable way. the back of his head is a familiar beautiful thing. i don’t like his face when he turns around, but those hips when he walks away, always. even though we’re going in the same direction. just to get a few steps ahead of me. Infuriating. five miles away now, at his house. alone? i doubt it. see that’s why i never call. i only like him when he’s alone. i pretend no one knows me better than him but that’s not true. it never was. i won’t describe anything as visceral as his body. we never even touched that much. i just think about it sometimes.

11 october (3rd day in my hometown)

9:03 pm

on a roll and reflecting. lazed the day away at home. went out just the once to get groceries i won’t be around to eat, but at least someone will. maybe not. she lets things go bad so easily.

asked her if she’s noticed any changes in me since i’ve come and gone and come again. used javi as an example. he’s more serious now in a hard shell way and tells stories like i’m his coworker. told a really funny one about ducks last night. i was jealous it didn’t happen to me. i’ll leave it at that so he can tell it. anyway she says she can’t be objective because she’s my mother but i’m more aggressive (her words) than i was before. brings back high school, holds me up to compare. i am also, somehow, more easily swayed. impressionable with too much dedication to what everyone else says. changing my mind for other people and their advice all the time. I take that poorly and she blames me for it. i’m not sure what else a college kid is meant to be but fumbling and open about it. Not too forceful i guess. I got angry and it was easy so she’s right. there are a lot of things i hoped she’d say but aggressive wasn’t one of them and it cuts me deeply. Spineless and emotional. Angry but with no convictions of my own. like a gun you point at whatever you want that keeps firing and firing. like one of those police attack dogs that goes wild in every direction. teeth carving into an apple cheek. My own mother. I thought i was growing some conviction but Okay.

It’s not high school and i don’t hate myself but i hate these words about me.

also thinking about old friends now and feeling bad. what a kid. Me, i mean. Mean is a good way to put it. Not outgrowing much i guess. Not growing! Ha! but i am, just sideways. Thinking about paul revere. the noah kahan song and not the guy, the man, the boy. it’s less funny and more serious, the folk music thing, when i’m here looking at the Furnishings that made it make sense.

10 October (2nd day in my hometown)

11:39 pm

Picked up javi from the airport. Missed my buddy. Finished my midterm paper right before we left the house to get him. Good and productive. some old Band Aid song was queued up from a playlist i hadn’t opened since summer (hopecore) and when javi got in the car he asked if i was still stuck on it. I guess since he hasn’t kept up with the daily things i’m up to for all he knows i really could have been listening to it nonstop in his big absence. The beginning and end point tell a bad story in this case.

Fish over braised cabbage and cannellini beans for dinner, with a green, lemon sauce to finish. The joys of being hosted. Home cooking but it’s javi’s house. They are almost interchangeable these days. Everything here is home now, even the parts i swore i hated. i love and i miss and i want this small town. we swallow each other whole and manifest in strange ways, both of us eaten and eating. And Chocolate cupcakes for dessert. Belated birthday for mom. Feels so bad, not being here enough. feels so good until i remember her. It’s impossible to call it one region in one world. My childhood is in all the differences.

9 October (1st day back in my hometown)

6:24 pm

Spent 10 minutes trying to break a coconut open in the Costco parking lot. Laughed harder about something pure and not at a person (even friends, together, in a completely unmalicious way) in a long time. Just about the hilarity of circumstance. Cracked it on the pavement and drank with a tiny straw wandering through Trader Joes. Probably looked crazy but felt so good.

1,500 words left and paper due tomorrow night! Bet i can start and finish in 2 hours and they won’t come from today. All the hard work and thinking is done anyway. Love the words in my head.

It struck me, standing in the soft scrape and echo of skates on ice, how this single string of words contained a whole pocket universe of breakfasts and comics and Slavic lineage, all merrily stitched together and sent forth to swim in the wide ocean of “real” and “respectable” names. I told Isabel later, because delight begs for witnesses, and she countered with her own family marvel: a semi-feral ragdoll cat whose full government name, the one printed on every reminder card from the vet, is Pennybean Reeves.

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I imagined a white-coated receptionist at the vet announcing, in solemn tones fit for Parliament, “Fried Egg Batman Sretenski, the doctor will see you now,” or “Pennybean Reeves to exam room two, please,” and this filled me with further delight, that somehow, somewhere in some perfectly serious database, these names will live forever.

And of course once you start noticing, the world overflows with them— Remus Lupin Plotnick, and Biscuit Rodriguez, and Puddles Mercedes Choi-Schwartzman— on and on, this roll-call of improbable citizens. All of these glorious first names a kind of private carnival, fastened lovingly to the solemnity of a surname that might once have appeared in a parish ledger or on an immigration form. It is nonsense carrying a passport, truly, a child’s crayon filling out important paperwork. Isn’t there something astonishingly tender in that? That a few typed fields on a screen— first name, last name— could make official what our hearts already know? It’s a quiet civic proclamation, that you are one of us, that you belong to a household and a history, that you are family. Not property, not merely animal, but kin, stitched into the same fabric of address and record as the rest of us, yes, each name a brief but official love poem proving that even our pets are counted among the beloved.

christine, nineteen,
speed demon, uneven 
eye sizes, unwise still
in all her big years, ears
unpierced, peering out
at the sea of strange faces 
of strangers she hopes will make space 
for her reasons and feelings, her brain
still half-baked, far too mean 
for her age, give 'em 
hell, she's life's lemon, 
who needs lemonade?
maybe me, look, she's made 
nineteen years of mistakes—
probably will make more! one foot
out the front door, give her
space to be missed and adore her 
return, lie and say she's sun-kissed 
though she burns 
like a lobster, she scowls 
like a mobster, 
one day she's so easy,
the next day all stern, 
always earnest though, you'd know
if you stopped and stared,
she's so blink-and-you'll-miss-it 
if you even cared, in the car
she likes singing, the charms 
on her bracelet go ringing, one arm 
out the window, the wind rolling 
over her skin, how she wants to be thinner, 
a winner, she'll take chicken dinner
if she had the choice, she's a 
big fan of boys but still a bigger hater,
berate her for it and she'll write poems
later, they're
probably shit but she's trying it
now, wow, she is getting braver,
she doubts in her savior but stays
anyway, does that still count? do you
think she's still a devout
catholic girl? hurl
your guts out at her, do your worst,
if it hurts she might leave but she'll
never forget you, i bet you
like that, well you should, 
she has no clue what's good 
for her, probably kale
and consistent failure,
but she hates both, so now what?
give all that you got
anyway! eat your greens! 
but she's a protein
predator, 
go get at her, 
that wannabe go-getter, 
she knows 
but not better 
and thinks she's so clever-
girl, devil girl, devil 
child, wild-
adjacent, too complacent 
to be fun, she's not the one, 
there's not much under 
the loud layers, 
that's what scares her, 
heart so heavy, 
head much heavier, 
weighed down 
by that knee-length hair 
that she can't style, it's been a while
since she tried smiling 
in the mirror, go and hear her
asking, asking, why am i here?
happy birthday!
one more year!

See, I have known him since we were children, and so I possess the rare and precocious devotion that can only come from friendship forged through adolescence, when the world is only people you know immediately, or perhaps the people you know immediately are your whole world. I have slept over in his basement and gone to his basketball games, and when that man had a cardiac arrest at the airport on our way home from that cruise we went on one Thanksgiving, he held me as my face scrunched up in horror at those limp arms flopping against the floor. I idled in his driveway and stroked his hair while he wept in the passenger seat of my car after I drove him around for an hour playing “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)” on repeat with the windows down the night he broke up with his girlfriend. In this way, he is “one of my very best friends.” And still, in my heart, which is so fond of this boy who I still see as this child, my child, my childhood, I know that if I’d gone off to college and met someone like him there, I would’ve stayed as far away from him as possible.

The thing is, I was too young when we met to understand things like politics, or how much money our families had, or how the fact that my parents are immigrants and his are not has something to do with that. I did not know that my family could barely afford that cruise, or that he was a premium member of their frequent traveler’s club. And yet, our parents knew. You see, my friendship with this boy was at least somewhat facilitated by them, particularly his mom and mine, who are also still close to this day. It was them who arranged these sleepovers and vacations, them who decided that political and economic differences were no big issue. We were taught to simply Not Talk About It.

But the thing about this dynamic is that when you grow up as the party that is disadvantaged, you aren’t just being polite when you ignore these things. His mother taught him to be kind and humble so as not to rub their family’s blatant wealth in our faces. I learned to hold my shame silently so as not to remind them of their power or remind my mother of our lack, lest I make anyone uncomfortable or seem ungrateful. What did I have to complain about, anyway? I have a modest, stable, middle class life. It was just that they had more. I confess, I was deluded. All of my friends seemed to have more, and too surrounded by wealth, I had no real benchmark of real poverty. I only knew we had less, which might not have made us poor but certainly poorer than everyone I knew, which was, again, my whole world.

As I got older and noticed these things, Not Talking About It started to make me feel dirty. Complicit. It was painful because I knew this boy, “one of my best friends,” had never thought about it like I did, as much as I did. And a part of me wanted him to, not to pity me but to understand how much privilege he’d gotten lucky with. Then again, what would that have achieved?

Beyond that, there was the issue of politics. I was ten when Donald Trump was first elected. “One of my very best friends” was happy because his parents were happy. I was happy because he was happy. I know my mother was probably shocked when I told her I was glad Donald Trump won the election, and personally devastated, but I can’t remember what she said or did to me then. I only remember this boy, my friend.

Still, slowly, I grew up and the world of people I knew grew wider and wider and I changed my mind, or maybe just built one of my own. So when I was twelve, I tried to bring up the topic of abortion. I remember yelling at “one of my very best friends” and, for the first time, being called “so emotional,” to which I promptly burst into tears. In this moment, at least, I remember my mother because she took my hands when I ran to her after and taught me that sometimes people are more important than politics, and it is better to just Not Talk About It. And she is right, but she is also so wrong. For too long, though, I obliged.

The reason why this boy is not merely “one of my very best friends” but “one of my very best friends from my hometown” is because if I met him now having never felt his tears drip down my arm over a girl, or seen him make a layup, or watched him pray at church or take the knife from his sister, I would never, ever consider being his friend. I would write him off as bigoted and misinformed and avoid him, tell my real friends who I have met in college about him and approve of their appropriate reactions of disgust. But he is “from my hometown” and also from my childhood, and he is still kind and humble, and he loves me, and I love him.

I am not my mother though. I have my convictions, and they tell me that Not Talking About It makes me complicit. I love people, but I respect myself, and I care about politics too much to ignore it for the sake of someone else’s comfort.

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So, seeing as I have decided I can not relinquish “one of my very best friends from my hometown” or myself and my convictions, there is not much to do but start Talking About It, gently, carefully, hopefully. I haven’t changed his mind yet, but maybe that’s not the only reason why we ought to talk to each other. I speak my own, and he finally explicitly knows where I stand. He also respects me— or fears my competence— too much to try to change my opinion. So we are maybe just a little more equal now.

The other, backwards way of piecing together these phrases is to understand him as a friend “from my hometown,” and more than that, “one of my very best friends” there. This is true because I don’t have many hometown friends, I suppose. I don’t speak to anyone from my high school anymore, and if I admit I am often lonesome or at least solitary when I come back home, it’ll be just this once and never again out of pride and shame. A much more palatable way of putting it is that I have always been elusive and picky with my friends, and so all of the ones I keep “from my hometown” are the ones I have deemed “my very best,” from hobbies or clubs or camps I’ve collected through the years.

So you see, it’s an unbreakable loop of understanding, this friendship.

But where was I? Right. I was going to a baseball game.

He picked me up just before the six o’clock local news came on, and I pawed at the door of his Tesla for so long he had to get out of the driver’s seat to show me how to open it. Apparently, you push the handle on one certain end and the other end pops out like a lever. Well, I was so used to him driving his other Tesla, which automatically sticks the whole handle out for me to pull, so I didn’t know that.

Now I am a notorious speeder, but it is much more frightening to obliterate the speed limit when you are sitting in the passenger seat and even worse when the car you are in is so low to the ground. Every now and then, I would feel a little tug to my stomach and recognize it as panic. These tugs never happened to me until very recently. These days, I get them almost every day.

We drove across the bridge swooping over the bay, and I looked up at the yellowing concrete columns supporting a cat’s cradle of highways, and I thought about dying. I wondered what I would do if the bridges gave out and the road we were on suddenly crumbled, all of us hurtling down towards the water. Surely, I would say something. Maybe “I love you,” just to say it. This boy says it often to me, and I always say it back. Every time, I wonder how much either of us means it. We crested the highest point of the bridge and I could see land, I thought to myself, acting like an explorer or a pirate and not a ridiculous, anxious girl sitting in a Tesla speeding along. I wondered if “one of my very best friends from my hometown” would keep his foot on the gas as we fell if he could see where we could be safe still straining on the collapsing road to get us forward, forward, forward. I wondered at what point he would let go of the wheel and reach for my hand, because somehow, I knew that like always it would be him with his arm outstretched first.

We made it across the bridge without ceremony. I looked out the window and wondered, despite being in the touristy and highly-policed side of Baltimore, whether a stray bullet could catch me between the eyes. Another tug.

We sat in the Bird Bath with our tickets that “one of my very best friends from my hometown” bought that I have yet to pay him back for, though he has yet to ask and I know he won’t, but that I must because if I take his money, I will prove I need it. He bought a cherry ICEE and I got a Diet Coke and we mixed them together and shared straws, but then we left the cups open-lidded in the cupholders of our seats and the man in the row in front of us slung his arm around the back of the adjacent chair and his pinky landed straight in my cup. I realized “one of my very best friends from my hometown” has an upside-down smile, which I had forgotten in the year of college we spent apart from each other, and it made a full appearance as we watched the man swirl his finger around a few times before looking and realizing what he was dunking his hand into. I was mortified on his behalf and turned the same color as the ICEE, Diet Coke added and all.

For nine innings, the two of us and the rest of the birds in this bath performed a strange charade: standing up and getting sprayed with a hose, sitting back down in the puddle on our plastic seats. The crack of a homerun? Standing, sprayed, sitting, soaked. A strikeout? Standing, sprayed, sitting, soaked. An RBI? Well, you can probably guess. For someone who had been preoccupied with thoughts of death for the past hour, it was great fun. I was well-prepared, my hair braided back and my shorts quick-dry, and it was the second day of a horrendous late-July heatwave, so sitting in a puddle of rapidly warming but momentarily cool water felt like a relief.

Halfway through the seventh inning, Jordan Westburg hit a pop up that landed right in the mitt of the Colorado Rockie standing in front of the Bird Bath. He tossed it up into the section and it would have clocked me right between the eyes, like the phantom bullet I’d been imagining earlier, if it weren’t for “one of my very best friends from my hometown.” His hand flew up to catch it, and the people scrambling around us went wild. Standing there, damp from the hose and sweat and spilled soda, eyes slightly crossed, rubbing my slick forehead, I felt the opposite of a tug. I was slack with luck. I doubt I would’ve died, but it’s nice to avoid a little pain if you can help it. Well, he helped it. Then he handed the baseball to me, and I blushed like I was his girlfriend. Which is never happening, by the way. Still, it was nice to lean in during the next inning so he could examine the ball, searching for the scuff where Westy’s bat made contact.

For the rest of the game, I kept tapping the ball to my head, imagining how much it would have hurt. Every time, I hit my temple a little bit harder, until “one of my very best friends from my hometown” looked at me strangely and took the ball away.

All of the water evaporated off our bodies on the walk out of the stadium back to the garage, so we drove home dry. On the way out, just before the bridge, we passed three cars on the shoulder, totaled and still smoking. I only saw one person standing outside the wreck, staring at the puffed out airbags. At that, I felt nothing at all, the slack from the earlier near-miss of suffering intensifying into numbness. I can’t remember if we drove any slower after we passed the crash, but I doubt I would’ve felt anything either way. When we arrived in my driveway once more, he got out of the car to walk me to the door and say hello to my mother. I hugged him on the steps and he gave the baseball back to me. As I watched his headlights flicker through the trees, I bounced it against my forehead.

Lately, I’ve been experiencing warring bouts of panic and despair. I call one of my other best friends to confide in him about these things and he tells me he feels the same way, but what else is new. Our conversations aren’t very productive though, because I am distressed about politics and war, and he is anxious about the environment. If either of us were to show too much compassion and expand our scope for concern, I’m sure we’d fall apart altogether and never wish to continue. So we move on to other things.

Knowing what I know about “one of my very best friends from my hometown,” I doubt he thinks much about any of these reasons for overwhelming despair. And I know I am Talking About It with him more, but sometimes, selfishly, I just want to watch a baseball game and only care if our team wins or loses. I want to see the sheen of sweat on his upper lip and know I have one too, and we are just two college kids sweating in a ball park. This reminds me that the despair doesn’t have to be all-consuming. Because if I had not gone to this baseball game, I’m sure it would’ve eaten me whole, at least for the night. Which is just an extreme version of all of my relationships these days.

More and more often, I find politics sneaking into all of my relationships. On a surface level, I like this. I’m the one sneaking it in, after all. I bring it up intentionally. But just as much as I want to talk to my friends about the things that— though not personal— haunt me, I want my friends to stop me and relieve my mind and soul for a little while. Because I can’t help myself, and without company I’d withdraw into myself completely.

In the moments just after I say goodbye to them and I am coming down from the high, my mood rapidly darkening back to grief at the war in Gaza or the Trump administration’s latest psychotic plan to gerrymander the everloving Christ out of Texas, I wonder if there is a healthier way to cope. Well, I certainly don’t know it.

So this is how I am living until I can figure out how to stop feeling so bad about the whole world. I am reverting back to childhood ways, reminding myself that the people around me were my world first, and they are doing okay. I turn my brain off and watch another baseball hurtle through the air, this time fast enough to really kill me if it got me in the head, and know it will no doubt fly long past me: going, going, gone.

driving home from the grocery 
          on a sunday afternoon a bit
early having skipped church as i do too
          often as of late
so much so that my questions about God 
          with a capital "g" all sound
lowercased now at least 
          that's what my mother means
to say with her wide eyes surprised when i ask her 
          about what she prays for as peaches go rolling 
around in the backseat i know sorry 
          yes yes i know i speed into the corners 
i'm poorer for it and she won't
          tell me shit about prayer saying 
why would you care meaning
          lost Godless cause 
we pass what is left of you on triadelphia 
          eyes like twin marbles catch mine long past vision 
and freckled fur speckled red 
          over downy baby brown flutters in the wind
rush fabricated by the never ending stream 
          of car engines screaming by
toothpick legs ready steady
          for the first time 
in death how unnatural you are 
          newborn having never 
wobbled now you never will

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          well do you see God 
with a capital "g" 
          in all things really i ask my mother 
thinking of you as she winces and where 
          is God
when bad things happen and i could name a million 
          examples plus a few but i'm 
thinking of you 
          as she stares at me pity-full still full of shit and says God 
doesn't cause our problems christine well 
          that's not what i asked but it has got me 
wondering whether she thinks every bad thing ever 
          belongs to believers who leave all their
problems to prayer 
          but why would i care right 
shit a surprise light prompts my right foot
          on the brake and again
more peaches go flying i'm trying to be better but whatever
          better peaches than deer God
the father doesn't bother 
          to solve that problem for me 
fake believer and all but he seems to have 
          endless resolve to absolve us of all 
if we feel we are faulty 
          but you're not my fault but my problem still 
because your ending was a bad thing that happened 
          not to me and not like i believe properly 
but i've decided you're a tragedy and i am
          thinking of you
so maybe you're mine in the eyes of God
          who my mother says i ought to offer
my problems because he can comfort 
          though he did not cause them and 
he will not solve them and 
          i tell my mother that we have the same God but
we will not end up the same in 
          God's gaze much less in the same place 
after life after all 
          and she asks why i'm so sure she's going 
to hell
          and i tell her i never said i knew for sure 
which one of us would end up burning
          but surely
if i am here looking for God and his will 
          in all things 
half of which she says God has not willed 
          and has no wish to deal with well 
one of us will not be right and what's worse is that
          thing that divides us in thought
or belief
          is how we ought to treat our shared God 
in the worst times 
          and times like those test us and i must confess that
i fear that i'm trying to force God to claim
          that he causes me pain
for the sake of his plan for me 
          not that i have no autonomy but because 
i want a path with a purpose that proves 
          i'm expected except that my mother says 
she makes her own plan and path and the bad 
          things are accidents God didn't will
and still
          i am thinking of you
precious creature who suffered so senselessly
          what makes my pain any different than yours maybe 
i'm the one going to hell 
          after all 
my whole thesis full of holes where all things holy 
          wholly slipped through
how foolish i feel as my mother asks what's this thought 
          experiment about anyway 
christine well see 
          i am trying to save my soul actually 
i think to myself while i shrug
          because out loud 
i am too proud to be more than really 
          quiet when she says mockingly
why don't you write about it mocking me so
          here i am thinking still of you 
fragile thing going rigid from the first 
          car to do its worst and touch you 
i wonder how much you 
          understood about pain and what 2 
tons of metal do to 4 pounds 
          of baby deer and God your 
tiny body just beginning 
          going cold a minute after getting 
warm still haunts me now as i concede 
          fine fine don't tell me 
what you pray for to my mother but next week 
          i'm coming to the shrine for mass to ask 
Jesus little lamb son of God why the fuck 
          you had to die and maybe next time 
or no 
          there will be no next time for you and i've
long since sped by but 
          for now vigorous rigor mortis will 
hold you 
          little one 
nothing else could ever 
          hurt you 
after life 
          after all

The answer varies from occasion to occasion, and yet he is always right. Because it makes going home that much better, because it gives people an excuse to stare. Because one day he will bring someone and everyone will know that someone is special. Because his waitress calls him “poor thing” and gives him extra fortune cookies with his check, because he secretly hopes someday the beautiful girl who orders spring rolls with her boyfriend every Friday night will show up alone and slide into the seat across from him. Because he does not like to share.

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He is the kind of man to be gentle and excellent with dogs but never adopt one. He would marry his dream girl and then let the divorce ruin him.

No, I don’t think I’ll explain myself.

She takes his plates and leaves the check, wonders at her hands that used to know more than yellow rubber dish gloves and the cool plastic slide of someone else’s money. Counts her gray hairs in the aluminum shine of the sink, thinks of her son and chooses four cookies tonight. She takes her time with this boy, her lost blonde child, her Saturday regular. Hopes for luck in the crinkle of wrappers.

Flip of hair. Humming Bono but not U2. He tips generously and then tips into the night. Like a lit match tossed into inky black oil, except his hair ignites nothing, and the darkness swallows him whole.

She reached the end of her walk and kept going, turned left at Triadelphia to where the road went double and the small houses hid. Matched the trucks homegoing and lost every time. Watched them swerve all the way to the wrong side of things and felt the hot rush of air and the ground buzz with horn, every make and model different as it screamed past her dead ears. Lost a shoe in some horse shit and kept going. Counted roadkill, subtracted the deer with spots. She was stolen by the open eyes. Rubber on sock sweat, the thudding of heels, stomping loud at the crows. Then she didn’t want to go anymore so she sat, sat alone and unbothered until she imagined being caught uninspired, counting eyes mine deer crow crow. Sweat cooling at every hairline. She thought if no one waited she would never go home.

Her head was loud and lucky, on a winning streak, every sound an answer. Clockwork, hot breath collecting at the base of the bed in sharp dog food exhales, the scratch of dark paws dreaming, shifting house bones, stacked pots settling, a lady’s fox scream, the worry of leaves, dead attic rats leaving ghost footprints on the ceiling.

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She went down to the garage and sat in the passenger seat. Never went anywhere. Whenever she touched the wheel she felt like dying. She used her hands to press the brakes and start the engine and fought the tangled aux and hit play. It was then and without intention that she ruined the song. In the absence of movement, gravel crunching under wheels and wind whipping by the windows and the world saying you are here you are here you are here, the music was groundless. The death of progress. Smooth sounds, thin sounds. The stillness of park, the engine fallen, the car just another room. The song was right already inside her mind but she was sharing with her body. Everything was wrong.

Please, my brain is trying to kill me.

Tommy still played covers at Old Point on weekends, the same as before. He liked the routine of it, the easy pay, the comfort of the songs and the rush of blood to his vanity at the applause. The week before, he and I had finally managed to convince Mark and Robbie to go with him, promising it would be short, nothing serious, a fake gig, practically an open mic just with tipping.

“You have the bassist now,” I’d said. “You’re practically a band. The only thing stopping you is you still have no audience.”

Robbie had frowned, but Mark said it beat making money at Dollar General.

“This doesn’t count as a debut,” Robbie had said dubiously. “We won’t be playing our own stuff.”

“Just covers,” Tommy had promised. “We’ll just play them straight.”

And they did, at first.

When I listen back to the Panasonic tape from that night, for the first ten or so minutes, around the chatter of the crowd and the clink of glasses, everything goes smoothly. Tommy warms up the crowd, they tune, and Mark counts them off. What’s precious happens after.

By the third song, Robbie went rogue. He took the second verse of a Trash Docket cover and rerouted it through something half-written and all his. He just couldn’t help himself. Mark caught on quick, bringing in a beat, and Tommy followed because he had no choice. They improvised through four minutes of something shapeless but electric, and when it ended, the crowd was there — really there — and all theirs.

“This still doesn’t count,” he’d shouted at me from the stage. But he was grinning, flushed or blushing, shy and proud up there on his platform.

Word started getting around after that. Local whispers from kids who’d been there, regulars who asked who they were, a bartender who said they were the best thing that’d happened to a Friday night in years. Robbie hadn’t said much about it since, but he’d started tuning more carefully, showing up at the garage even earlier. Sometimes he slept there, on some spare towels by Mark’s kit. He wrote with an urgency I hadn’t seen before, as though he could feel something closing in.

I kept thinking about what Robbie had said to me before: I always have fun, but I’m also proving something.

It got to a point. It was a weeknight in early September, too late for summer, too early for fall, and just warm enough to pretend things weren’t about to change.

They’d been riffing on the same phrase for the better part of an hour, running it in circles like they could outpace its imperfections if they just kept moving. Robbie kept shifting the second chord — barely a change, just a different shade of the same bruise — murmuring to himself, rewriting phrases on the fly and discarding them just as fast. Mark had stopped trying to keep up entirely, tapping out the barest of rhythms with his heel against the bass drum, hands wandering. Tommy sat slouched on a broken amp, eyes half-lidded, waiting for someone to either get it right, or give up.

Finally, Robbie flinched like the song had bitten him. He yanked the guitar strap off his shoulder and dropped the instrument, the strings letting out a discordant whine as they hit the cement barely padded with a towel.

“We can’t use this bullshit,” he said, voice strained. “Fuck.”

He grabbed the page nearest him, which he’d rewritten four, maybe five times in the last hour, and without hesitation tore it in half, then into quarters, ripping and ripping until some jagged constellation of paper fragments scattered across the garage floor like flakes of dead skin.

I still must be a nobody then, because I’m not hurting yet.

No one said anything.

Tommy shifted, glancing at Mark. Mark ignored him, bending down to adjust one of the drum stands. The snare was a Supraphonic with a crack near the lug. Later, Tommy would buy him a new one and he would turn it down, saying the original still rang fine.

Robbie turned toward the house without another word, one hand already in his pocket for a cigarette he probably wouldn’t light, not inside, but it gave him something to do with his hands. At the threshold he paused, just long enough that if anyone had wanted to stop him, they could have. Mark sighed. Then the screen door shut with a dull thud, and Robbie was gone.

The three of us left lingered in the stillness, every stray noise blown louder by the otherwise empty soundspace. The whine of the amp. The buzz of the bulb. The moth was back again, bumping against the glass like it couldn’t decide if it was in love with the light or trapped by it.

I turned to Mark. “Does he do that a lot?”

He didn’t answer at first, rolling two sticks between his palms, holding it up like he was checking its balance. Then he nodded, but jerked his head to the side at the last second, like he couldn’t quite decide. “Only when it matters.”

He sat back, exhaled harshly through his nose, and looked up at the moth, squinting into the light.

Tommy was still sitting on the amp, bass across his lap, fingers curled absently around the tuning. His eyes were vagrant though his hands were settled, flicking between us, then toward the house, then up at the moth, then back to the floor.

“We used to talk about performing,” Mark confessed. “Just for fun, you know? Open mic stuff, dive bars. I thought we were ready.” He paused, glancing at the house. “But Robbie always said no. He said we couldn’t play for anyone until it was perfect. He wanted to come out of nowhere and wreck everyone.”

He smiled crookedly, unamused but affectionate.

“Then you showed up,” he said, looking at me and tilting his head at Tommy. “And now suddenly we aren’t waiting anymore.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“It’s just like he said. I think he takes you as a sign. Now all of a sudden we’re close and we have permission to keep pushing, so when we get a chance we might actually be ready for it.”

I want to be in a band. I want to make something so good I want to die, so I can live with myself.

Tommy didn’t say anything, but he leaned back then, plucking a single low note as if in agreement. I wasn’t sure if it had been accidental, a ring on his hand happening to strike a string as he shifted his body. But it was just the one, and he let it reverberate for a moment before muting it with the soft globe of his palm. Mark had gone quiet again.

Outside, the porch light flickered once, then stayed steady.

I didn’t linger much longer after that. Tommy muttered something about needing sleep and I followed him out, though I doubted I would get any that night. The drive back to the motel was silence somehow stilted — the same stillness that Robbie had left us with in the garage. I left the windows down and let the night air come in. I kept thinking about Robbie.

I still must be a nobody then, because I’m not hurting yet.

About the way he tore the page up like it meant nothing to him anymore, like destroying it was the inevitable finale, the completion of its journey. About what Mark said: Only when it matters.

It did matter, that night. Maybe not to anyone else yet, but to him. I recognized what was haunting him even then, long before I found the words for it: the beginning of ambition.

I’m proving something. I just haven’t figured out what yet.

All those years ago, back when it was just one drop of praise — barely that, a handful of locals from a bar — it was already poisoning him. The pressure to be brilliant, always. To be more than just good — to be undeniable. To make something so true it would leave a mark on anyone who touched it.

In all the years I knew him, I don’t know if he ever got certain that he was a rockstar. But back then, I’m sure he suspected he could be, and that was the first moment I saw ambition get tangled with his play. Before then, it was only the music and his own mind that kept pulling him back to the garage. His instincts were surprising and usually right. I’d never seen him doubt them. I still think about the first time I saw him play, the night of the Battle of the Bands. What he’d said to me the day after: You’re the one who got to us first. That makes you part of this.

He hadn’t shown me a real set or even something as well-defined as rehearsal, not then or in the weeks after. I wasn’t an audience or part of the judgment. When I’d asked him if he wrote, I’d admitted I did too.

I always have fun.

I was part of play, stumbling into his natural habitat, witnessing a ritual fit of passion. Offering my own practices because he was willing to be honest.

This is the best thing to do.

I pulled into the motel lot slowly, parked under the burnt-out overhead light. Sat there for a while, watching the red vacancy sign buzz through the windshield. My story was a mess, my mind always changing, and the papers I filled one night would contradict what I thought when I reread them the next. They were still a mystery to me — the band and Robbie, both, all of them — transforming in rapid bursts of evolution every minute I spent near them.

I went inside and sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the landline on the bedside table. Next to it was a battered copy of the Bible that I’d found in one of the drawers. I’d taken to thumbing through it every night, right before bed, imagining Mark and Robbie reciting the passages at Sunday school as boys. My eyes drifted back to the phone, wondering if it might ring on its own.

I picked it up and called Stacy.

She answered on the second ring. “Oh, so you’re alive?”

“Yeah,” I said, rubbing my palms up and down my jeans. “Sorry.”

She waited. I heard her lighter flick in the background, a clink of glass, a thick swallow.

“I didn’t write the beer piece,” I admitted.

“I figured.”

“I never even started it.”

There was a long pause before she said, “I never cared about that story.”

It occurred to me that my time at Rapture wasn’t going to end like a faucet shutting off. It was petering out drip by drip. First my obligations to them had faded, and when the magazine sent out its last paychecks and print issues, their obligation to me would be gone too.

I wondered if people in Stacy’s life were counting on Rapture to keep her afloat, so she could keep them afloat. I knew that for myself, the only life that would suffer if the magazine shut down was my own. My mother used to say my father never returned from Vietnam quite right, and she left not long after he killed himself, the spring before I graduated college. My sister inherited the house, filling it with the kind of family you could take pictures of but never write about, or write back to. It didn’t take long for her to lose my address and stop sending letters.

“So how are the garage boys?” Stacy asked finally, like she didn’t care but also like she’d been waiting for me to say their names.

“Robbie,” I said. “And Mark. And Tommy Cash, do you remember him? TOMCAT?”

“That alt-pop near-miss from ’86?” Her voice broke into something a little disbelieving.

“He’s their bassist, if you’d believe it.” I laughed. “He’s new to the band, technically, but it’s like he’s always been there. You’d get it if you saw them together.”

“And?”

I hesitated. I didn’t know how to describe them to someone who’d never heard their sound. I guess that was what I’d been spending the last three weeks trying to figure out. If I told her I was one of them, a part of it, she’d laugh and probably ask what my going rate was.

“They don’t talk much when they play,” I said carefully. “They just... listen to each other. It’s like they’re having a conversation none of us are invited to, but the second you’re in the room, you want to understand it. You want to learn the language.”

“Jesus. You sound like their press release.”

“I know. Sorry.”

She waited.

“They make each other better,” I added, softer this time. “They really do. They’re young, yeah, but they play like they’ve already done this a dozen times in another life.” I thought about Robbie and the papers tattered on the garage floor. “I think they’ve been waiting to matter for so long. Now that it’s starting to happen, they’re afraid they might ruin it.”

“So what makes these guys different from every other group of almost-famous twenty-somethings you’ve seen?”

I paused, getting up from the bed to fumble in the pockets of my jacket, which I’d slung over an armchair when I’d come in.

“You just have to hear it,” I said. “I recorded them at this local bar. It was just supposed to be harmless stuff, you know, covers of old Trash Docket and Velvet Sessions. But then Robbie broke formation and Mark just followed, and Tommy just went with it, and…”

I trailed off, my hand frozen in front of me. I’d been waving it in the air like a preacher.

“I have the tape,” I said, finally. “Do you want to hear it?”

“Yes,” she said, immediately. “If this is bullshit, I’ll stop anticipating an article from you.”

My breath hitched. I crossed the room, slid the cassette — LIT ANAL 1985, which I had thought was hilarious when I labeled it until my college roommate found it and gave it a listen, only to hear me monologuing about theme and symbolism — into the Panasonic and hit playback. I waited for the soft click of rewind, then held the receiver to the speaker and let it go.

The hiss came first, as always. Then the crowd, faint and restless, chairs dragging. Someone laughed at one of Tommy’s jokes. I hit fast forward and let the first two songs whir by, and when I let it resume, I caught the boys mid-chord. Off-center, raw, alive. Mark kicked in behind it, steady but searching, and Robbie’s voice followed, starting with a mutter that built into a yowl yanked out of him, unrehearsed and unforgiving. Then Tommy found the harmony and locked it down.

I didn’t say a word. Neither did Stacy.

The tape kept going for four minutes of not quite perfect, but close enough. When it clicked to a stop, I brought the phone back to my ear.

“Okay,” she said. “I get it.”

There was a pause. I could almost hear her leaning forward, pressing her forehead to her hand as though the weight of the deadline — the real, hard deadline — had just come back.

“You better write this thing,” she said. “Fast. Before Rapture dies.”

Then she hung up.

Robbie and Mark were already in the garage, the latter in a pile of angular limbs on the ground, flipping through a crate of tapes, while the former leaned against the far wall, guitar slung loose over his shoulder, one sneaker braced against an old amp stack, tuning.

I’d told them when I arrived that Tommy Cash would be coming.

Mark had raised an eyebrow. “Who?”

They had no idea about TOMCAT then, I’d gathered. It was amazing to me that they’d gotten this far, existing in a musical vacuum. Robbie had told me one evening, mid-practice, that they’d watched local shows before, but he preferred devoting himself to his own stuff rather than following cover bands that wouldn’t give him the time of day. Still, they were expectant when I told them about Tommy Cash, like they knew something was about to happen and were just waiting for his set of headlights to sweep across the driveway.

Tommy’s car was some kind of battered Oldsmobile. Blue, or what was left of blue, with one hubcap missing and a sticker on the bumper faded beyond legibility. He didn’t turn off the engine right away, idling in Mark’s driveway for a second as though he was giving us a chance to come outside and greet him. No one moved. Eventually, he killed the engine and stepped out.

He popped the trunk with a casual elbow, pulled out a battered bass case, and slammed it shut with the side of his fist. The cigarette behind his ear drooped but he didn’t seem to notice.

Tommy stepped into the garage like he was entering a real venue, his eyes sweeping the space hungrily as he prowled the perimeter — brick walls, cable tangles, a half-dead ashtray on the windowsill, duct tape on everything that mattered. Mark stood from the tape crate, blowing and popping a piece of bubble gum with a snap. He extended a hand to Tommy to shake, then retracted it as Tommy blew past him with a wink. Robbie shifted the guitar slightly on his shoulder, but didn’t make to move beyond that, waiting. I clutched a Bic pen in my fist and let my gaze bounce between them.

Tommy finally stopped in front of me. “This is it?”

Mark spit his gum out and stuck it to the wall. “You’re late.”

Tommy raised his eyebrows. “You’re loud.” He gestured to Robbie with a jerk of his chin. “And what about you? You gonna play for me?”

A flash of annoyance sharpened Robbie’s stare, and he shot me a scornful glance, but finally, the weight of the guitar on his body won him over and he turned on his amp.

“Well, yeah,” he said. “I play for everyone.”

Robbie adjusted his grip on the guitar neck and strummed a single, open chord. The garage swallowed it whole and then gave it back, warped and raw. Robbie’s fingers danced across the frets, picking out a melody he’d been toying with the entire time I’d been there, harmonizing with the echo. He added a second melody halfway through and the beat slowed a little, his hands still a little clumsy trying to shape two themes at once. He smiled at himself. When the echo faded, he patted the strings silent and shrugged.

“I’m tuned.”

Tommy’s eyes blew wide and then retracted, his eyebrows softening a little, and he put his case down. He unpacked his bass without ceremony, forgoing tuning, skipping warm-ups. It was immaculate, a 1976 Rickenbacker, Jetglo finish polished to a mirror.

“Can I steal this?” he asked, tapping his foot against a spare amp.

“Knock yourself out,” Mark replied, grabbing his sticks and adjusting his stool. He shot me an incredulous look, like I was responsible for this guy, and I realized I was.

Tommy plucked one low, punchy line to check the connection before declaring, “I’ll play with you for a week.” Then he eyed Mark with a frown. “If it sucks, I’m gone.”

Mark didn’t bite, twirling his sticks coolly.

“It won’t,” Robbie said, already turning the volume up. Then, with just a trace of mockery, “You gonna play for me?”

Tommy barked out a laugh, and Mark counted them in.

It started with something easy: Robbie striking the same chord three times, slow, almost hesitant. Then Mark came in with the snare, syncopated and half a beat late, filling in the gaps or maybe hoping to make more, his gaze cloudy as it flitted between Robbie and the newcomer. Tommy watched them for two measures, then eased himself in — low, tight, exact — just how I’d found him performing at the bar. He was stitching the space between them shut.

It was happening — completion.

I moved closer, paper clutched in one hand, pen fumbling with the other. The walls trembled. The light bulb in the ceiling buzzed louder. A moth battered itself stupid against the glass.

They didn’t talk as they played, but they eyed each other. There was something there, an alignment forming, these two performers circling. Tommy — so used to being a solo act — stole the melody from time to time, and Robbie obliged before pivoting to something new, taking his music through proofs and urging Tommy to keep up, the sounds oversaturated with an animal desire to impress. It was even better than before — Robbie showing us he was trying. New things, strange things, experimenting on Tommy to see what the bass could offer. The music pulled between them, taut like strings, and every time they moved, their bodies seemed to catch on some different chord, strumming a brand new harmony unlike anything I’d heard before. All the while, Mark played himself sloppy underneath, driving them in and out of time, occasionally stopping to wipe his hands on his jeans and pick the beat back up without explanation.

After maybe six or seven minutes, the magic rhythm broke. Robbie let his last chord ring out, and Mark followed with a final tap of cymbal and snare.

Tommy cracked his knuckles. “Not bad,” he said.

Robbie raised his eyebrows. “Not bad?”

Tommy grinned, cocky. “I might stay.”

Mark finally smiled at the bassist, a small crooked thing, before tossing a roll of duct tape at him. “Then fix your strap.”

Tommy laughed, swatting the silver blur out of the air, but eventually conceded, patching the split leather. Robbie lit a cigarette and sat on the amp, watching. One of his rituals, I was starting to notice. He caught my eye and held out the pack, and I accepted it hesitantly.

“I didn’t bring a lighter,” I began, and he tossed me one without saying anything, warm from his palm and lime green.

They played again, and again. Ten minutes, then twenty. Robbie started improvising vocals, trying out smeary, slurred lyrics that he dropped in and out of as they came to him. The nicotine headrush made me feel like I was drowning in it. Tommy pushed the tempo; Mark slowed it. Robbie refused to notice either way, letting his part come through on its own schedule, short and sharp, quick willful decisions. Everyone else could catch up if they wanted.

I was fixed on a milk crate with the tape recorder in my lap, but I only had WRIT SEM ‘86 on hand, and I didn’t want to record over it. It was part of their story. Instead, I grabbed a piece of scrap paper from a green milk crate I’d seen Robbie reach into regularly — filled with old take out menus, napkins, receipts, and envelopes — and I tried to write.

Tommy snaked his way over to me at one point, casting a shadow over my lap as he tried to read my words upside down. He stopped playing, and Mark and Robbie tripped over each other in his sudden absence, already accommodating this new, third voice.

“Is this going in your story?” he asked. The garage was so quiet.

“Some of it,” I said. “And, uh, you’re in my light.”

He took a step back, putting a hand up apologetically.

“You gonna quote me?”

“If you say anything usable.”

“Promise?”

“Just play,” Robbie said, sounding annoyed from behind a cloud of smoke.

Tommy rolled his eyes but started thumbing chords anyway, and Robbie spat his second cigarette onto the ground, stamping it out with a heel. There it began again, all that rich, vicious sound. Chocolate and clockwork and velvet and thudding, thick and immediate and alive.

The day after that first jam with Tommy, I showed up early. Really early, like mid-morning, pulling into the same spot by the curb but in broad daylight, engine ticking into silence, half-empty gas station coffee in my hand. It was a Monday, and Ziggy’s gave Robbie Mondays off. He’d told me as much the night before, right after he’d said I could stop by the house even when they weren’t practicing.

Hands shoved in his pockets, he’d shrugged and muttered something about process. I, too, had avoided his eyes when I’d admitted I didn’t have much else to work on anyway.

The garage door was still down when I arrived, so I sat on the curb and waited for a few minutes, enjoying the full shade of maple trees bursting with leaves, a sight rare from my motel window, where I was surrounded by parking lot and interstate and strip malls, and even rarer in Los Angeles. The air smelled like lawn clippings and cheap asphalt. A hose hissed faintly from a few houses down. Across the street, a porch fan spun lazily in the shade.

It was Robbie who opened the door, barefoot and already sweating so his hair was starting to cling to itself again. His shirt was rumpled, his sweatpants rolled up to his knees unevenly. He looked like he hadn’t slept, or like he’d been dreaming too hard to try anything like resting.

“You came,” he said, his voice raspy. “Come in.”

Inside, the garage was quiet, the hum of amps notably absent, as was Mark. Robbie padded past a mess of cables and gear and dropped to the floor, stooping over yet another row of milk crates, these ones overturned into a makeshift desk with a slab of cardboard across their tops. Miscellaneous papers littered the surface and spilled onto the floor — the same green crate napkins and receipts, notebook pages torn in half and written over again. Some sported chords, but most were lyrics. He didn’t look up when I toed a stray cord and dragged an additional lone milk crate over to him. I watched as he pressed a pen hard into the corner of a takeout menu.

“Are you writing a new song?” I asked, careful not to step on anything.

“I’ve been trying.”

I sat a few feet off but still beside him and watched him work without taking out my notebook. I wondered what it would feel like if I did, the two of us sat there side by side, writing two completely different works but doing it together. In that moment, my story felt such a long way from finished. His was right there, getting closer and closer.

“What’s it sound like?” I asked after a moment.

In answer, Robbie scooted away from his desk and picked up the guitar resting beside him, already plugged in, already waiting. He played a few bars, rough but deliberate, a descending pattern that felt like falling in slow motion. He fingered through it twice, then stopped to scribble something on the back of the menu. Tried it again, slightly altered.

Large swaths of time passed like quick breaths. At some point I had pulled my own papers out anyway and was attempting to describe the exact expression Robbie made while he was playing, right before he stopped to write something down. Brows once knit finally opening up, easy, and his lips parting as though the notes had arrived on accident, inspired and surprising.

“Hey, Scotty,” Robbie said absently. “Are you gonna make me famous?”

He already was famous. I was so sure of it.

“You’re gonna make yourself famous,” I told him. “I’m just here to describe it as it happens.”

“That’s nice,” he said softly. “That’s a nice thing to say.”

A beat passed.

“Don’t you believe that?” I couldn’t figure him out.

Robbie gave a half-shrug. “I’m not gonna tell you I believe in myself. I don’t know yet.”

He set his pen down and ran a hand through his hair.

“I just think if you’re gonna make something, it should matter. And if it doesn’t matter, you probably weren’t the one who should’ve made it.”

I nodded, slowly. I wasn’t sure if he was talking about my story and about him, or about him and his music. “You always think like that?”

“No,” he said. “Sometimes it doesn’t have to matter, and I feel like the best to ever do it.” He smirked, just barely. Then, quieter, “But yeah. Mostly.”

“Do you ever just play for fun?”

He looked up at me then, confused. I remember feeling disappointed in myself, that I’d misunderstood him.

“I always have fun,” he said. “This is the best thing to do.” He picked at a spot of duct-tape peeling from his strap. “But I’m also proving something. I just haven’t figured out what yet.”

He went back to scribbling.

I watched his hand move, frantic but careful. Meticulous, his pen treading so lightly.

“You know,” he said after a moment, “people talk about suffering like it’s the price of talent. Like if it hurts, it’s working.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I don’t know, maybe. Yeah. I think I still must be a nobody then, because I’m not hurting yet and it’s still so much fun.”

He stood then, stretched, and picked up his guitar again. Played a line. Wrote it down. Played it again.

“I want this,” he said suddenly. “I want to be in a band. I want to make something so good I want to die, so I can live with myself.”

The sound of the Oldsmobile revving outside interrupted my thought. Tommy arrived, bass slung over his shoulder, hair still damp from the shower, or a swim, or a night on the street sweating.

“What’s this?”

“Something new,” Robbie said, still hunched over, writing.

Tommy didn’t answer right away. He stood there for a second, taking in the mess and the music. I doubt it was anything Tommy had ever experienced before. TOMCAT was used to being told what to do, even if he didn’t listen. He was old friends with setlists, bars, clear direction. At Old Point he covered classics with clear vision and technique, sometimes straying at the bridge but always coming back for the ending.

Robbie just played. He looped the riff again, eyes closed, shoulders twisting. His mouth moved, soundless, shaping words that hadn’t landed yet. Searching and searching.

It was magnetic and I wrote that it was so, just to participate in the atmosphere in the way that I could. Tommy did the same, stepping forward, plugging in. The amp crackled to life. He waited for one more pass, a surfer watching the swell, poised to run at the ocean, then slipped beneath the melody, found the root, and fell in under him — seamless, as though it had been written that way all along.

Just like that, something shifted. The riff settled. The shape held.

Robbie played it one more time through, then stopped abruptly and looked over his shoulder, his eyes skimming past me to fix on Tommy.

“What do you think?” he asked.

Tommy laughed. “Walker was right. It’s magic.”

Robbie blinked, once, like the answer caught him off guard. He cleared his throat.

“It’s just something I’ve been thinking about.”

Tommy shrugged, tuning slightly, fingers still dancing on the neck of the bass. He played alone then, low and steady, filling the air like warm water poured into a waiting cup. I could almost hear Robbie over it, phantom strains from his guitar over the flat sections where he should have been. I couldn’t deny what my brain was already doing for me, piecing them together on instinct, like it was chemical.

“Off the old quarry road,” she said, barely glancing up from her notepad. “Fifteen minutes if you don’t miss the turn.” Then she squinted at me with theatrical scrutiny.

“You thinking of going there for dinner, hon? The food here’s much better.”

“I just heard someone mention it,” I said. “I was thinking of checking it out.”

She refilled my coffee out of habit. “I heard ‘em too. It’s true, that bass kid plays there sometimes,” she said. “He doesn’t play like I remember though. I swear, these days, the whole bar shakes when he plugs in.”

There was something funny about it all, about Tommy Cash. I’d figure it out soon enough.

Old Point Tavern didn’t look open when I got there. It was a low-roofed establishment with sun-faded Crown banners hanging from the awning and a hand-painted sign that had lost half the letters to weather. The inside smelled like beer and bleach and like something had died a long time ago but refused to leave. Certainly no music. The perimeter was strewn with bar stools sporting cracked vinyl covers and a jukebox blinking in the corner like it wanted to be put out of its misery.

There was one guy behind the bar, polishing glasses lazily.

“You looking for someone?” he asked when I stepped inside. “Kitchen’s closed.”

“Do you know a Tommy Cash? I heard he plays here.”

“Tom? Yeah, Fridays and Saturdays. Usually late. Sometimes he shows up for soundcheck and stays through last call.” He eyed me. “Are you a friend?”

“Trying to be.”

That night I brought the Panasonic back to the garage. I set it down on the amp again, hit play, and let Side A fill the air again. Mark stopped tapping long enough to listen, and Robbie sat back on the amp right next to the recorder, eyes narrowed, lips pinching a fresh cigarette while his fingers fiddled with a lighter.

The air shifted with the weight of their attention. All three of us could hear something taking form, echoing off the garage walls.

I’d taken to jotting notes while they played. Word pairings, verbs, descriptions I didn’t want to forget: Mark’s high-hat skip on the second take; the way Robbie’s voice sounded just before it cracked; the exact second I realized a loop wasn’t broken, just unresolved. I didn’t think they’d notice — usually too busy in their own worlds, drowning in their own noise — but that night we were all equal, the two of them so far removed from creating, completely occupied in being an audience, and I caught Robbie glance sideways while I reviewed my notes. Just once, glass green eyes snagged on the papers in my lap.

When the tape finished, I reminded them of what I’d told them that very first night: “You need a bassist.”

Robbie didn’t even blink. He heard it; he knew. “Okay.”

Mark raised an eyebrow at me, almost amused. “Any potentials?”

“Maybe.”

On my second Saturday night in town, I went back to Old Point.

The night before, I’d told Robbie and Mark I wouldn’t be around. No reason offered and none asked for. Robbie hummed acknowledgment without looking up from a crumpled stack of sheet music, and Mark just shrugged like it made sense to him. It occurred to me at that moment that they could talk about me while I wasn’t there. I decided not to flatter myself. That was the thing about them — everything mattered, but not too much.

This time the bar was open, and it was loud. The hum of the crowd nestled in my gums and sat in my chest like a second heartbeat. Packed, the place felt significantly smaller than before. I put my hand on the wall at one point and felt it shivering with the effort of holding all the sound inside.

In the middle of it all was Tommy, I was sure of it. Shirt half-buttoned, sweat already darkening his collar. His fingers were curled around the neck of the bass, nails flushed white, like he was throttling it. I watched him pop strings back and forth like rubber bands. His hair — dark, messy, lush and curling at the ends like it hadn’t been brushed all week — clung to his neck and forehead under the lights. He was tall, broad-shouldered, strong-nosed and stronger-jawed. Movie-star good-looking, polished, but almost too shiny. There was something vicious about him, his blue eyes too bright to be friendly.

Somewhere, in the back of my head, there was that flicker of something again, of recognition, almost. Like I’d seen him before.

I stood in the back near the jukebox and watched him tear through a cover of something I didn’t recognize, the rhythm so heavy it felt like my lungs were synced to it, my breath catching in my throat if I tried to inhale before Tommy wanted me to. His body moved like he’d choreographed the whole thing days ago in his sleep: quick turns, a look over the shoulder, that half-smile that said he knew exactly how good he looked with a spotlight bleeding down the back of his neck.

He was flashy, but clearly that was what everyone was here for. He sauntered across the stage confirming that he was who they all said he was, and what they all said was that he was good-looking, and more than that, just good. The kind of good that tested whether the speakers would hold, that walked into a room and expected the air to shift. He’d never been wrong so far. Anyone not paying attention would regret it.

He didn’t need to be in a band. He was the band. His name was already on posters.

That’s when it hit me. His name had been on posters, and so had his face. TOMCAT. Not this version of him exactly, but some matte kid that never sweat. Much younger and more posed in a magazine spread — one of Rapture’s old competitors — sporting too much eyeliner and maybe a leather vest. I recalled the conversation I’d overheard at the Silver Dollar. An almost-pop-star. That’s exactly what he was. He’d had one song that got college radio play, and then he’d disappeared in the late ‘80s. So this was what he was up to now.

Watching him throw his head back, lips parted, eyes half-lidded, curls bouncing slightly, I had no doubt he could’ve been a model even if the music hadn’t worked out. Instead, he was here. So he’d walked away from all that, I figured. Either he was done with fame entirely or he’d decided it was music or nothing. Something about the way he watched the crowd watch him — even in that tiny, small town bar — made me suspect the latter.

I needed to convince him that Robbie and Mark were worth gambling on. They were going to be a band, and they were going to be worth another walk down the unforgiving road towards fame. I was sure it would be easy to convince Tommy that they needed him, but I was less sure how to prove to him that he needed them. Whatever alt-pop hesitation Tommy had felt in his teen years was gone, the glittery promise of fame and the expectation of palateability chipped away to reveal his core devotion to music, which was always his virtue and would someday be his vice. This Tommy was confident, in love with himself and what he could do on his own. Robbie and Mark needed that confidence.

Mark made you move. Robbie made you listen. Tommy made you watch.

This was completion, though unfinished. This would be my story.

After the show, I caught Tommy at the bar, a towel slung over his shoulder, counting cash from a glass jar with a grin on his face because he’d earned every dollar.

“Are you TOMCAT?”

His smile stretched into a wince.

“Who’s asking?”

“I’m Scott Walker. I write for Rapture. I’ve been working with a couple guys out in the suburbs. Have you ever heard of Robbie Rozak?”

His eyes finally dragged up to my face, slowly, reluctant to part from the money. He sized me up, then shook his head. “Nope. I’ve heard of Rapture though.”

I hesitated for too long, and someone in the crowd called out his name. Before he could walk away for good, I pushed.

“Look, these guys aren’t a band yet, but I swear they’re close. You know Rapture. You must know I’ve listened to so much music, like, a fuck ton of music, and I’ve never heard anything like this before. They’re like magic.”

Tommy scoffed. “So what do you need me for?”

“They need a bassist. And they need a bassist that’s good enough for them. You could be the thing that makes them real.”

Tommy smiled, slow and sideways, like he’d heard that line before, and better. “You trying to get me to a garage show, man?”

“I’m trying to get you into a story,” I said. “Something that’s about to be more than just a story.” It sounded cooler in my head. Out loud it felt like I was the band in utero and he was the reporter, and I’d just handed him a mixtape and asked him to change my life.

He didn’t respond right away, biting his lip and frowning at me like he was waiting for me to try again. His eyes darted back to the cash.

“They’re looking for a guy like you,” I said. “When was the last time you were in a band?” He arched a brow.

“A guy like me,” he echoed, ignoring my question, “that’s good enough for them.”

He grabbed the cash and folded it in half, tapping the wad against an open palm, and turned to face me completely.

“What’d you think of my set?”

“I thought it was—” My brain scrambled for the right word, the writer’s word. I couldn’t find it. “—raw. Your sound is tight and loud; you’ve got presence, control, bite. You knew exactly how to hold the room.”

He didn’t blink.

“But you know that already,” I added, quieter. “You’re clean and technical, but that’s a baseline. What you’ve really got is this instinct in your playing that tells you how close you can get to the edge without falling off it. That’s what makes you good enough for my band.”

I immediately felt strange laying claim over Robbie, and Mark, and their future, but I could tell Tommy liked whatever I was saying. He didn’t need any validation, but admiration was a form of currency, and he wanted to see if I could afford him. I was a writer. I could give him whatever words he wanted and then some. I set a standard and then I elevated him to it, and that was worth more than just telling him he was good. He was good enough.

“You’d fit. You’d fill the room without suffocating their sound. They need someone like you.”

Tommy took a sip of water from a glass the bartender slid towards him, catching it without taking his eyes off of me.

“When?”

I immediately felt my shoulders loosen. He was going to give them a chance.

“Tomorrow evening, after seven.”

I pulled a receipt and a spare ballpoint out of my pocket and scribbled Mark’s address on the blank side, then handed it to him.

He leaned back, fingering the edge, considering.

“If I wanted to stay small, I’d stay solo.”

“You won’t be small for very long.”

The bar had started to empty by then, leaving the stretched out silence of a sore stomach overfilled, finally digesting. A few bodies hunched over their drinks, swaying to a song playing low on the jukebox — something slow and past its prime. A waitress wiped down a booth in wide circles. Neon beer signs buzzed faintly in the corners, throwing light across the floor like spilled highlighters.

“One night,” he said finally. “No promises.”

“One week,” I countered. “Give it that long, at least. If it sucks, you walk, no hard feelings. But give them enough time to show you everything they can do.”

Tommy bit the inside of his cheek and chewed for a minute, highlighting the sharpness of his cheekbones. Finally, he said, “Fair.”

I thanked him once and then walked away before I could look more desperate or he could change his mind. Outside, the air was thick with the smell of beer and heavy, summer heat and something else, something electric. The leftover charge of Tommy’s set, maybe, still buzzing in the asphalt. I stood there for a minute, blinking up at the faded tavern sign, thinking about what I’d just done.

Robbie wouldn’t have asked twice, I thought. But he also wouldn’t have had to — not if Tommy had driven by the garage and heard him. That was the difference, wasn’t it?

Robbie’s music didn’t need an introduction or an afterward. It could be received always, even while it was still happening, still becoming. A song could be half-finished and still wreck you. People didn’t need to hear all of it to find a reason to believe in it.

Writing on the other hand only mattered once it was done. Nobody pulled over to read a sentence in progress. Nobody came to watch a paragraph be revised. You had to survive the whole thing to be worthy of attention. By then, the moment had already passed.

One version opened with the beer gig I was supposed to be covering. Another tried to romanticize the suburbia I was marooned in. A third was just bullet points that ended with “NO BASSIST.”

I had one good line, one maybe-good line: He looked at me like he’d been expecting me, like I was late. I stared at it until the letters lost meaning, then scratched it out because it felt too omniscient. It was too early to act like I knew what was going on in Robbie’s head. It was so obvious that I was trying to sound like a writer instead of just saying what happened. Like Robbie though, I knew the line had come from me, and because it was mine, even if I destroyed it, I could come back to it later.

I’d been in the motel for a week longer than planned by then. I never did end up writing the brewery piece and I hadn’t called Stacy yet to tell her I never would. Secretly patient Stacy Fry, who always went easier on me than she should have. Rapture was going under, and so it seemed were my obligations. Regarding Robbie and Mark, I also had nothing to give her.

What was happening to me? I had never been so passionate and simultaneously so trapped. Every night I watched two guys in a garage play something half-perfect, good and real if not for the fact that it was incomplete. A perpetual audience of one on a milk crate, I didn’t know what to do with that. I was used to writing about people after they happened. This was like trying to describe a storm still assembling in the sky. I knew they weren’t going to become a band within a week, but neither of them had any suggestions for a way to get there, Mark always skirting around the question of a bassist and Robbie shying away from suggestions of a venue or an end date to their practicing. I think subconsciously they were afraid.

Still, they were practicing for something, which meant subconsciously they also wanted to be something. They were going to be a band. I was sure of it, as sure as I was that if I wrote their whole story now, wrote them off as something stationary, I’d ruin their potential.

So I was trapped between the fall of Rapture and the rise of these boys, paralyzed between urgency and patience. I couldn’t bring myself to leave, to try to find them again later. I was scared someone else might find them and snatch their story from me, scared that I’d become a banker whose only exposure to music would be the radio on the way to and from work. Worse, I was scared I might come back in a year and they’d still be in that garage.

I’d gotten back earlier than usual — earlier than midnight — that night. Mark had bailed with a massive yawn mid-jam, exhausted from extra shifts he’d picked up during the day. They both worked, I’d learned, Mark as a store manager at Dollar General and Robbie as a delivery boy for Ziggy’s Pizza Parlor. Robbie didn’t say much after that. He unplugged the amp and lit a cigarette, but didn’t offer me one. I’d tried not to look expectant. He was silent while he watched me go.

I ate a gas station dinner and drank a warm Coke on the drive back. The motel room was practically mine by then — my undershirts drying on the radiator, the rest of the spare contents of my suitcase in the bathroom or the closet. I’d washed my underwear in the sink the day before. I hadn’t packed enough of anything to stay as long as I had. Of course, I had never been planning to stay.

I’d be there forever if I never got Robbie and Mark out of that garage. I kept trying to start again.

They don’t have a name. They don’t know what they are yet. But they sound like…

Something I didn’t know how to describe yet, still so incomplete. Sighing, I tossed my pen onto the note pad and rubbed out a knot that had formed between my eyebrows. I needed something else to hold on to, something that didn’t just exist in my head.

My recorder was an old Panasonic with scuffed edges and a back that popped open if you held it wrong, the kind with cheap little cassettes that made a rattling sound when you shook them. I’d used it back in college to record interviews, lectures, my own voice trying out headlines at 2 a.m. back when I thought I was going to be the next Will Wilder. Back when I thought I could still make things happen just by writing them down.

The cassette I used that night had a sticker on it that said: WRIT SEM 1986.

I rewound it with a pencil and recorded over it.

When I got there the garage door was open as always, and by always I really mean all that I knew, which at that time was still just a week. Mark was drumming with headphones on, no shirt, moving through some imagined song only he could hear. Robbie was sitting on the edge of the amp, guitar beside him on a towel, clipping his fingernails.

I pulled the recorder from my bag as I approached, setting it on the amp to get Robbie’s attention.

“What’s this for?”

“It’s a tape recorder. I want to use it to keep records of your sound.”

“I know what a tape recorder looks like,” he said drily, but he shrugged as he stood to retrieve his guitar from the ground. “Cool. Let’s do it.”

He shouted at Mark, who flinched before pulling the headphones from his ears.

“What?”

“I brought a tape recorder,” I said. “Is it okay if I record you guys today?”

Mark shrugged. “Sure, if it helps with your project.”

Robbie spent a few minutes grabbing things from one corner or another, positioning a mic stand at mouth level and running an extension cord into the house. Finally, he plugged his guitar into an amp, and it crackled to life.

I pressed record just as he counted off softly, and Mark clicked his sticks together in tandem before picking up a steady beat. The tape clicked, the red light blinked, and then, music.

Sounds moved through the air, catching on the edges of language. Robbie played in loops, half-riffs, murmurs that never quite became verses. Mark followed, then wandered off, then came back again like he was chasing some wild thing coming in and out of phantom fog.

The tape hissed. It caught every missed note, every inhale, every laugh half-swallowed between phrases. They didn’t talk much between takes. Once, Robbie muttered something about the string action being too high. Once, Mark shouted “Faster?” and then ignored his own suggestion. I watched the tape spin and spin. Side A. Forty-five minutes of the first sounds they would ever keep.

Halfway through, hands still moving, Robbie shouted at me, “Did you get what you need?”

“What, to write about you?”

Robbie nodded.

“Not yet,” I admitted. “I’m still just listening, figuring stuff out.”

“Good.” He struck a chord that felt like a shrug. “We’re not done yet.”

They played over the tape clicking, over the cassette wheezing into silence. I flipped the tape as quickly as I could and pressed record again, and they just kept going.

“We’re on Side B,” I announced.

Robbie smiled at me then, a real smile, for the first time ever. “Side B of what?”

I didn’t have an answer for him. I’d expected him to know what he was making, then, and I suspect he did — he just wanted me to say it. Robbie loved to pull that move, always waiting for someone else to do it. I just wanted him to keep playing.

It was the right thing to ask though, because as I drove back to the motel it haunted me. I had no idea what to call the cassette rattling in my bag. I played it back while I got ready for bed and fell asleep certain of two things: they needed a bassist, and they needed a name.

The morning after I taped Side A and Side B, which in my head I was still calling WRIT SEM ‘86, I woke up with the sound of it echoing in my ears. That muffled garage reverb; Mark’s loose snare taps, wandering footsteps from a dream. Robbie’s voice coming in slightly off key and then correcting at the chorus, total satisfaction, like he’d planned it just for the tape.

I hadn’t slept well, or at all, really. The tape had played through once in my sleep, long enough to wake me from somewhere deep when it clicked and reversed. I lay there on the thin motel mattress listening to the hiss, the hum, the sound of something unfinished.

I still couldn’t write anything substantial yet. What I could do was eat, and think, and listen to the recording again.

I ended up at the same diner as my first night in town, The Silver Dollar, two exits off the main interstate. Red booths, watery coffee, walls yellowed with old smoke. There was a payphone mounted near the register and a jukebox that hadn’t been updated in at least five years, sporting names like Orlaine, Ricky Valentine, something mislabeled “Velvet Sesions.” The waitress called me “hon” without irony and filled my cup three times before I even looked at the menu.

I was replaying the tape through a pair of earbuds so old the rubber around the wires had gone brittle and was starting to crack. I’d listened to Side A three times already, mentally tallying the hisses and hums and hollow spaces where something should’ve been. It was all there — the ache in Robbie’s voice, the way Mark let the beat loosen and then snatched it back — but the songs were top-heavy, floating too close to the ceiling. It was perfect until it was terrible, those tripping, empty stretches when the drums got too harsh and Robbie’s voice went thin. The more I listened to it the more frequent those stretches were. They needed a low end. They needed a floor.

They needed a bass guitar.

I ripped the wires away from my head in a burst of conviction, frustration, desperate slippery hunger. It hit me again that this thing I was documenting was rare and elusive because it was happening and not already happened, but there was a problem. It might’ve been my failure as a writer or my ambition as a listener, but I couldn’t begin to describe their creation because it wasn’t complete. And I knew there was a difference between complete and finished. Everything I might’ve written would’ve been steeped in my own conviction that they could be better. I wanted to capture potential, but more than that I wanted to witness ignition.

I couldn’t file something half-formed, telling Stacy I had a band when what I had was two guys who I could orbit forever but never quite land on. I needed them to be undeniable. And for that, they needed a bassist.

I was still staring at the Panasonic when I heard the gruff voice from the booth behind me. A name, a story. Something about music.

I couldn’t tell you what might’ve happened if I hadn’t heard it, because I did. I was supposed to hear it and I did. That luck I’d been born with spun like a compass pointing me true.

“You ever heard of Tommy Cash? Some kind of almost-pop-star kid from up north. That’s his real name, too.”

I froze halfway through my omelet. That name caught on a hook deep in the back of my brain. I swore I recognized it, but from where?

“That the Chapman kid’s friend? The one he went up to play with?”

“No, that’s someone else, I think. Those boys are still out of town. Apparently, this Cash kid is the one who keeps blowing out the speakers at Old Point.”

I turned my head just enough to catch them in my periphery. Two guys, flannel and work boots, one with sunglasses tucked into the neck of his T-shirt pulling his collar down to reveal the glimpse of a tattoo. I picked the tomatoes out of my eggs and tried to maintain a posture that implied sullen and uninterested, but my pen was already out, scribbling on my legal pad.

Old Point Tommy Cash. I underlined it twice, with harsh slashes.

A scoff. “That kid? Yeah, I’ve seen that kid. Doesn’t seem like a popstar to me though. Last time I went to Old Point he snapped a string and kept playing.”

A popstar on strings. Guitar or bass? They hadn’t said, and I had to find out.

I waited until their check was signed, the moment between standing and leaving, before I got up too, catching the taller one just before he reached the door.

“Hey,” I said, trying to sound casual. “That guy you were talking about. Tommy Cash?” The name felt so familiar in my mouth. It stayed easy on the tongue, I guess. That was part of Tommy’s charm.

He looked me up and down, trying to place me. He must’ve seen something familiar on my face, something starstruck, because he said, “Yeah?”

“What does he play?”

“Bass.”

I thanked him and went back to my booth, hands buzzing. He shook his head and left me to my crazy.

Too good to be true, I thought. Too neat. It was like someone higher up wanted this story to write itself.

Tommy Cash, the Old Point bassist. I didn’t recognize him yet, but I knew the shape of a sentence when it was trying to introduce a character. It had to be a sign.

Disorder began, and ended I suppose, in my mind. As a child in pride and insatiable hunger for praise I signed up for every activity, or no, that’s not true. But my mother indulged my curiosities with the caveat that they were to become ambitions, and some of those curiosities had to be things she was curious about too. Very quickly I realized I lived in a world of adults and I hoped to belong, and to feel like one or be chosen by one I had to make them excited, which naturally led me to things like the piano and crochet, hobbies— no, skills— that were only exceptional and thus worthwhile if I was good enough at them at a young enough age. So began my relentless practice. That’s not to say this was in any way my mother’s doing, only that the first sign of trouble reared its ugly head in the form of my desire to be the most, the favored, the best.

And yet, I think even before I’d been altered by the mechanics of praise, which back then were still exclusively related to capability and not aesthetics, before I realized I was perceived and evaluated and perhaps rewarded and this was desirable, being desirable, I was already delighted by the body. My body, my being— vulnerable and undeniable in its needs, offering limitless sensation. The very act of sustaining life held me in rapture.

In the summer I would lie on the cold linoleum kitchen floor under the blast of air conditioning until I was unbearably numb, then walk barefoot onto the driveway and stand on the blistering pavement, palms extended towards the sun, shivering into equilibrium. I would suck glass after glass of water down with a straw until it stuck in my throat, then jump up and down to feel it slosh in my stomach— proof of function.

Eating, too, was a conduit for pleasure. Sometimes I am flung back to Julys unreachable now, and I remember the good years, before inhibition. I can see it, the head tilted to the side like a lover leaning in for a nibble of the ear, arm raised wrist bent carving the awkward silhouette of a swan’s broken neck, tongue lapping at soft skin the swell just above the elbow revealed in its bending catching peach juice tear drops as they trickled between fingers down the palm towards the forearm’s tender underbelly devoid of tan all summer, staring directly into the sun behind a half-revealed pit, white flesh torn and glossy and glowing like a halo. A twisted portrait of a little monster gorging, flushed and tinged with child’s delight.

The trouble continued and worsened with my inability to quit. I have never been very good at knowing when to stop— except no, that’s not true. It has always been less about knowing really and more about feeling, and the feeling is passion, and terror, and shame, yes, as I said it was praise that infected my mind but even before that it was pride. For that, I have only myself to blame. What I mean to say, then, is that I have never been very good at allowing myself to stop. I am perfectly lucid within my urges to take things further. Too far, sometimes, not because I’m unaware of what I’m doing but because I simply cannot help myself.

In Disorder, I was simultaneously so in touch with my body and so removed from it, so used to knowing its wants and needs and rejecting them both, which made the betrayal more intimate, more cutting. If I had not known better, it would have merely been gross negligence. If only it had been so easy to forget I was hungry, but the inner child prideful and sustained by delight was ravenous for sensation.

I have always been very aware of wants and needs and I enjoy confusing the two; I need praise, and praise needs perfection. In truth, neither of those things have ever been needs and I know that, but I still say they are anyway because of my feeling. With cruelty and intention I lied to myself, so determined to carry on because there is no greater shame than conceding I was not good enough for something I once wanted or thought I should want. Without trust or respect, all hard deadlines relative, all limits self-imposed, there were no checks and balances on the things I made myself do or keep doing. The strangler and the strangled, the weapon and the wounded, the mind and the body and the mind once again, I am crippled by my conviction.

Denying myself, I became filthy with desperation. Starvation never hollowed me out as I’d imagined it would. I was nothing like an instrument or a seashell or a throat— there is nothing clean or beautiful about dying.

About killing yourself, really. It teaches you nothing.

I’d imagined myself biblically, an angel of abstinence and exodus. I lay in repose, my shoulder blades slowly carved free like feather-plucked wings, my collarbones small miracles, my hips modern stigmata. It was proof of my loyalty, but there was no God there. In my mind I possessed the precious rhythm of seventeen, hopeful and perfect, still untouchable but only just. I was not prepared to be struck, and I expected to echo. Instead, I crumpled, sweet music decomposing. I was a rotted core, consumed from the outside to reveal the most disgusting, horrifying parts of my being.

What a dirty feeling to crave what I once did to my body even though I remember what it also did to my life. How unfair that the good evidence is hidden now, my beautiful bones buried underneath everything I gained back and yet the scale hidden in a garbage bag in my mother’s closet the silence from the boy who could’ve loved me if I hadn’t if I’d never the arm squeezes and “You look so much better” and “I missed you” and the mirror and my predator eyes looking at my prey body chewing and the spitting and the thinking are here, and here, and here.

I still can’t pray like I used to, believe like I used to. I go through the motions like digesting, like bleeding, because I really can’t help myself, but God is the passenger airbag turning on again and the backlighting of dressing room mirrors and walking by windows that remind me I’m being, reflected, and when I fall to my knees it’s still less out of awe and devotion at all of bright beautiful creation and more because I am too weak to keep standing anymore.

Every Sunday in hunger and devastation I used to wait— not pray— for Communion. Limping towards the altar I was not fearfully absolved but rather terrified of the body of Christ, because it wasn’t the Eucharist wasn’t transformed wasn’t a vehicle for mercy but rather a wafer of bread with calories I couldn’t count. Lord forgive me for the crackers that never became flesh, on my bones, love, in my body.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. When did it begin exactly? There are symptoms and consequences, but the origins of any injury are in the initial breaking of body and mind, and I have not yet discovered when that happened to mine. Perhaps it was less though, an injury than an infection. In fact, it was more, like a disease I was susceptible to because of that defect in my brain of obsession. Something malignant developed and took hold, a random misfire in my brain that formed a new pathway I got too comfortable following. At first it seemed harmless, until it carved deeper and deeper.

The brain is the softest part of the human body, and somewhere along the way I became terrified of tenderness. Resilient and adaptable and a pleasure to teach, I was rewarded in elementary and middle school with glowing reports from all of my teachers. To learn was to be malleable, and I was desperate to be the most so I pushed myself further and memorized the feeling of mastery, mapping out a web of curiosities and ideas and desires on the fatty surface of my mind. It began just like that, a network to be explored and interwoven with the rest of my habits, a lifestyle to be tested and acquired, collected. What I hadn’t expected was the familiar rhythm of accommodation, the instinct to thrive regardless of the circumstances. But succeeding at something poisonous isn’t thriving, is it? Disorder stripped my mind down to a singular pathway of desire and it calcified— my brain withered into a knobby, bony thing, finally revealed when the dimples of belief and cellulite affections melted away.

At my worst, I dreamed in textured technicolor and turned the trace smell of salt in my night sweats into subconscious feasts. In my mind I escaped aesthetics and became the queen of sense and pleasure, letting golden egg yolk trickle into scallion fried rice glistening with sesame oil, catching globs of melting ice cream pooling at the soggy edges of a waffle cone with my tongue, sinking my teeth into buttermilk pancakes crisped in butter despite the nonstick pan my father bought from TJ Maxx while I stared at the dusty bags of pasta in the MISC FOOD aisle and yearned to twirl flat ribbons of pappardelle bathed in pesto and parmesan on an adult-sized fork.

There is nothing honorable about that kind of preoccupation— coveting food forbidden like a discipline, devoted to the mountain range spine jutting from my neck to my concave tailbone like a deathbed sinner before iconography.

Eating was a precious indulgence I should not— no, could not— practice regularly, normally. I was choosing between a cup of black coffee and an extra strawberry after dinner, a piece of gum and half a packet of sugar-free electrolyte mix. Every thought was consuming. My lifestyle became more than a set of targets and goals; it went beyond rules; it was unbreakable inertia. Mealtimes, then, were sacred routines: ritual chewing, celebratory swallow. There was no joy in it, only brief moments of allowance. Completely alone in my religion, I was miserable when I finished my perfectly measured out meals before anyone else and ashamed when I was the last one still eating. I knew, or no, I believed I was superior in my diet and my habits, but enslaved by judgement and comparison, I would lose every time I ate with someone else.

Hunger is the great equalizer, and I could not be vulnerable like that. Disorder unlocked a new kind of hatred in my heart: a disgust towards human beings, even those most precious to me, for performing the basic act of staying alive.

I told myself it was a means to an end— the eating alone, the not-eating alone. It was like I was waiting to be rewarded and unburdened. But those expectations originated from an unspoken truth that I couldn’t admit until I was far, far away from that condition:

I was suffering.

And it got me no closer to God, to truth, to freedom. My isolation was not profound, but profane. The only hallowed ground it ever brought me to was the children’s ward of the Johns Hopkins Hospital.

I remember it clearly, the first signs of spring. I had survived the worst of it— the brutal winter with its harsh winds whipping my flagpole legs, sending my sweatpants billowing around me, trying to tear them off and leave me naked; its brief glimpses of daylight that I squandered away, dozing on the way home with my head bent at an awkward angle to rest on the car window, the bones in my neck like raw pasta snapped sideways.

It was a Wednesday, around 60 degrees in the mid-afternoon, and I was on spring break, I was a senior in high school who had already gotten into my dream college; I had no responsibilities since I’d stopped skating, complaining of joint pain in my hip when really I had just lost all inclination to leave my bed, so weary and unwilling to keep throwing myself at the ice. I was determined that this was everything I could have ever wanted. Nothing terrible had happened to me, after all.

But I remember trying to sit outside on the porch to read, and I couldn’t without a pillow underneath me because the hard concrete was so bruising on my joints, and I was freezing even though I was bundled in blankets and the sun was shining.

My mother took me to the doctor. She said it was because I was getting surgery for my hip — which I was already anxious about because it would interfere with my ability to exercise — and she wanted to make sure I was healthy and okay. In hindsight, I suspect she was only being truthful about the latter half of her explanation, because the examination ended up having nothing to do with my joints.

I loved the way my legs looked in the glass door reflection as we walked into the medical center.

A nurse made me wear a gown and step on the scale, and I saw double digits and stood up straighter for her to take my height. In the exam room, I swung my legs impatiently, thinking about what I was going to have for dinner. My pediatrician came in and looked at my mother.

“She needs to be in a hospital,” she said.

My mother just crumpled, her face twisting into a deep frown and a million wrinkles marring her forehead. But she didn’t act surprised, or disagree.

They didn’t address me back then, when I had only my stony, walnut brain to defend myself with. My jaw dropped.

“What about Worlds?” I remember asking. Everything I had worked for, the international competition it had taken nine competitive seasons of skating to qualify for, the one that would take me to France, the one I had been dreaming about since elementary school, was falling apart in my hands like clumps of damp sand finally drying and dissolving into powder. I must have known, deep down, that I hadn’t been to practice in months, but this and all the other realities were trapped outside the walls of my tiny, measured life.

I was devastated, naturally. But somewhere dark in me, new pathways were finally being drawn and strange ideas were forming with rapid, vibrant, panicked frenzy and my calcified shell cracked a little, because oh, this was something entirely new, and I waited in anticipation to hear what else she could possibly have to say.

But what could she tell me that I hadn’t already known?

I realized that for the first time in months, there was a version of me that I recognized in the exam room, the old me, the real me that was so desperately relieved to finally be seen and set free, the horrible rhythm stopped, my exhausted frozen body caught and cradled by this doctor telling me I had to get help.

I tried to stop her, and in the end I let her win. And I was myself in both of those instances, fighting against myself and for myself, and I see it so clearly now.

Before I left, she touched my shoulders, gently, like she was afraid of my bird bones jutting out like wings. “My daughter,” she said quietly. “She had this too. She survived; she got through it, but it’ll be the hardest thing you do.”

I blinked my wide, glassy eyes at her in wonder and giddy relief. This was the end of everything-so-far.

“Good luck,” she told my mother.

As soon as we got home, I scuttled to the kitchen and set our biggest pot on the stove.

I ate whole boiled eggs on cottage cheese, peaches and raspberries, a whole cantaloupe, like I was dying, because I was. They were taking me away.

The walls had been torn down, the flood gates thrown open, and I was released unto my life like a wild creature in a newly unfamiliar land, gnashing my teeth and arbitrary rules that meant nothing anymore, now that my future was so uncertain.

My mother told me I could stop, and she sounded so sad, but I couldn’t and I didn’t and she let me have at it, that little girl again with peach juice running down her arm, lapping up the sensations.

Share PERCEPTION MANIFESTO

I will not tell you everything that happened in the hospital, but if you have ever been in a special ward, you understand the flavor of the air. Whether it’s true or not, the beeps and the buzzing and the padded footsteps start to sound like the music of dying.

It was an eerie, dystopian week.

Bed-ridden and strapped to a monitor from 12-points taped to my skin, with a camera watching me at all hours, I stared out the window at the grimy Baltimore skyline. My phone was confiscated. I was given an iPad disconnected from WiFi. They gave me oversized socks with rubber soles, and I remember looking at my legs and hating them, thinking I looked a lot like Dobby the House Elf.

The nurses had me perform this strange routine— every night I was shaken awake after my monitor went off because my heart rate was too slow; like clockwork, every morning I was directed to the bathroom and measured; I talked to psychiatrists and psychologists. The psychologists were benign and easy to predict. The psychiatrists wanted me to stay with them forever. I was frightened that my mother would agree and give me away to them.

I read The Kite Runner because the head of “my team” gave me the book. I read My Year of Rest and Relaxation for the title and Rilke because it was overdue from the library.

Every morning before they weighed me, I’d look in the mirror and see that I’d gotten a little more color back. My cheeks started blushing again, and I made real jokes that weren’t at anyone’s expense. The nurses brought me colored string, and I started making summer camp friendship bracelets in all their favorite colors. I memorized their names and preened when I could delight them. I think I made about twenty bracelets in the two days I had the materials for it. I gave them to everyone. I was so ready to be kind again.

It felt like a game until we started having conversations about what would happen afterward, and I realized this was my life. It wasn’t fun or fascinating anymore to be timed whenever I ate or have to drink a calculated portion of a meal-replacement shake to compensate for the last bit of peanut butter I didn’t scrape from the container or the pad of butter I forgot to put on my toast. Suddenly I wanted to go back to my friends, who I hadn’t seen since I’d gotten obsessed with Disorder months prior. I wanted to make my own sandwiches without being preoccupied with what was on them or how those numbers looked. Everything was melting away and I saw my future very clearly, a supercut of bright images to match the soundtrack of the first playlist I’d made in almost a year. I hadn’t realized that I’d stopped listening to music.

I argued with the psychiatrists and pleaded with my mother. This was a dystopian experiment, not my life. I think my mother must have been tired of leaving my side every time the nurse came in with a plastic tray of dismal food and explaining to the psychiatrists that just because my uncle is suicidal doesn’t mean depression runs in the family because a week later I walked out of the hospital after having refused a wheelchair.

It wasn’t as simple as returning to my life.

I felt like a war hero coming home to a town that had moved on without her. And the war was still in my head, trapping me between what I knew I wanted and what I thought I should have.

Three weeks had passed since I’d been released from the hospital, and I was still afraid of egg yolks and bananas and more than half a teaspoon of olive oil. April was almost over, and I was to leave soon for that international ice skating competition that I was no longer allowed to participate in. I’d fought my way onto the plane, but not the ice. This is something else that was stolen from me, that I stole from myself. It seems I will never compete on French ice— my childhood dream, now burnt and bitter. I understand, I suppose. My coaches were afraid I would shatter if I fell, a kaleidoscope of bone, tooth, and nail on la patinoire. Like porcelain, they treated me. I was too brittle, too beautiful, too thin.

A year later, I am fuller and so is my life. But as are most things after they’ve been lost, it will never be the same now that it has returned to me. I don’t fit exactly with the people I still care about the most, at least, not the way I used to.

I must have gotten lost in my own helpless rhythm, and trapped in the most obsessive and starved parts of my brain, I shrank my body to see if I could and got addicted to the feeling, not of being small but getting smaller, until I didn’t fit in my life anymore though I couldn’t bring myself to care. I must have forgotten that I was a person in other peoples’ lives too, and now that I remember, I have twice as much to grieve knowing that my life was also tied to a web of relationships.

Well I was so small and angry and cold and alone, emaciated and spinning on a hamster wheel called rigid routine, and at that point the person I used to be and the things that were important to me, the people who were everything, were all gone.

But I’d been burrowed deeply into a secret version of that boy, The Boy, that only I got, so when I disappeared into my head and stopped answering the phone, stopped showing up to things, I think he was suddenly left with a little hollow spot where he’d always expected to find a friend, with benefits. I guess I’d compare it to that feeling when you’re resting skin to skin with someone, and when they move, your skin goes freezing cold and there’s a soft pink outline of where his hand was on your thigh.

But a hollow in a person is a gaping wound, exposed to the elements. Well, I don’t know if my half-dying ever hurt him as much as that, but the way I’ve understood it, he was cold and a little more empty when I was gone and she was something warm and whole, and she fit— this other girl. And suddenly there was no room for me there anymore.

A small part of me believes that if I shrink down to a sliver, I could wedge myself between them and live there, but the last thing I want is to be pressed between two hearts beating only for each other now, pushing against me, through me, to reach and touch again. I would be so unwanted.

I said I was never hollow, and I still think that’s true because I was always insatiable. If I was ever a vessel not overflowing, it was because I was in between draining myself of kindness and wonder and collecting obsession and addiction as replacements. Now, I am whole and heavy again, but not quite healed. I am kind but obsessed, and wonder-full but addicted to remembering what I can’t have anymore, this life that could have been where I am allowed to look and touch.

Sometimes, on especially bad days, I can feel it in my thinking— the deep cut running through my brain, the black tide pulling me out to sea.

It is on those days that I remember I’d starve myself to death if I could.

It’s the first warm night in a while, late enough 
into March that it feels 
worth your time and unlike 
the fluke Tuesdays of early February wandering 
the streets of West Philly with your pinky hooked tightly
in a Hinge date lover’s, having never
met before. 
The sun is low, burning tangerine candy-
colored streaks into the sky, 
and you leave the window open for the time
being, brave. 

The night air cigarette-scent, incense, weighs 
heavy, sticks 
in your wet hair, waits
with you for the knock expected 
any second now. Turns
bitter under waxy yuzu perfume rubbed 
into both sides of your bare 
naked, waiting 
neck. 

Black coffee undertow pulls citrus out to sea, the smell
tangled in your kelp hair, brand new and beautiful. There
is the city, in all its lost parts, consuming you whole— mind,
body, and soul saturated in grey sludge— you know, the stuff mashed 
into all the curbs lining the streets that make cities
smell like cities and not like the air 
between buildings, which you thought
would be clean. Back then, back when 
white curtains blew into baby blue 
walls, framed 
in your memory.

Time 
presses in time 
with the proud howl of a si-
ren passing by. 
Urgently, 
you are fourteen 
again, insides 
scraped clean. Terrified,
you think, maybe
you’re just getting it 
over with. Again, handing your body
to the first boy to ask. 

A stray cluster of fine hairs makes itself known 
on the outside of your knee, the brown
paper bag skin skipped
over even after two passes of your best 
friend’s best
razor running up 
and down and
up and down the thinnest thigh you’ve ever had—
in a sudden discovery, of 
imperfection.

Somewhere, maybe 
five miles from here, a baseball hurtles towards violence— the crack 
against wooden bat— thrown 
by a Major League arm. 
Closer, a trigger-happy hand obliges, two shots firing 
in rapid succession. And here
he is. Knuckles rapping at the baseball bat door, his bones the ball, his bones
the bullet, this boy
a gun.

Knees knocking in reply, the razor’s fail-
ure an afterthought, you
open the door and 
meet eyes and
make eyes and think about
making out. 

He has his hand around the neck of a bottle 
of wine, the nice kind, 
which he offers, and you trade: his grasp 
on the glass for your waist which he snakes
a shy arm around. Lingers, almost
slyly, surprising. 
You confess you know nothing
about wine, and he tells you 
what he knows, which is only what the liquor store clerk said 
was good but still cheap,
and you laugh in relief, feeling 
young, once more. 

At the door he parts with his shoes, otherwise tracking
all of Philly all over your warped wooden floors. You like that— he’s walked 
all over the city and for now, in this moment, he has stopped. Here, 
for one thing, for you. 

Fish over rice, the man trapped in the halal cart cries, 
and the sound and the white sauce smothered smell cozy up and together in your kitchen, pick a fight 
with Old Spice 
Fiji he— the boy, toy, gun, the one— has applied 
generously. 
But the house always wins, and the house is your home opening wide 
for the city and the island breeze concedes, immediacy over-
come by the pungent aroma and abundant 
ethic oozing from another 
city immigrant. 
In time, it fades.

A chopstick and a steak knife make love to the cork, giving way with a dull pop,
breaching, an ache. Blood red, bitter pour forms
an arc into twin cups 
for just dinner without “party” after the word, and 
a droplet at the lip falls to the counter leaving spots 
when the mouth pulls away too 
suddenly. 

Young laughter spills 
from drunk lips. Six girls stumble
past your window, voices carrying 
on the wind though they don’t know you’re just inside, eyes wide and mind
harmonizing, keeping time
with their joy, this boy 
falling for 
your old jokes. 
His thumb strokes
the outside of your thigh. Finally, arrived 
at the bottom of the bottle.

When he dives
for your mouth you’re not surprised. He tastes like wine 
and something much more juvenile: 
that mango vape you once thought you could stop 
him hitting, the first time
he caught your eye. Soft whine
and heavy breathing, leaning 
further in. He wins and wills you on your back. You gasp,
his hands in curls 
on curls and fingertips on scalp. 

His mouth moves lower, no-
where special. “Yes, you
are,” he swears, and there 
you are,
open to the whole room and the whole room open
to the warm world 
through the window. He blows
breath on a line of saliva, and you writhe up
with a smile.

Finally, body just as much
as mind.
And the wounds are gone and years have never passed 
the way you remember them. You have never cried 
on your childhood
bed while a boy tried 
to undress 
you. Here, and now and new, you
are adored, unadorned.

Crawling back 
up the couch to nose your neck. You let
his mouth feel, drown in
mouthfeel. Offer to return
the favor, savor 
his sweet headshake: later.

He is your heart, undone
from your body. He laughs,
and you find it
familial, familiar.

He whispers “I love you” 
into your ear and a woman on the street 
screams back.