It’s all the same. 

We see this land’s redundancy, but we don’t actually notice it until we pay attention to the blur outside the backseat window for once—although, in this day and age, that has become a chore in and of itself. There’s the McDonalds. The QuikTrip. The Arby’s. Starbucks. Mattress Firm. Power plant. WE BUY GOLD. A run-down Chinese joint that looks authentic as it does hopeless. It looks like it has been mistakenly teleported from somewhere else—somewhere greater, more deserving, where dirt doesn’t settle into the chipped red windowsills and the rare customer is not puzzled by the fat, laughing gold Budai on the corner of the host’s podium up front. I want to yell at them to go back where they came from, not because they disgust me, but because they are my people and no one deserves to be in a place like this. I want the restaurant to grow legs and walk away, escape. 

Traffic picks up—the GREEN DRAGON shrinks into the background behind a row of gas stations. 

Drive through these towns for hours, and you’ll feel like you’re trapped in a time loop; a broken record blasting Lady Gaga and Eminem and Billy Joel, one or two or all of the three. At night, the road signs and generic diner storefronts and fluorescent gas station lamps look like substitute stars. Smoke and gas cover the night sky now, so we make our own, and they taste like grease. The ones we think are real blink and then swim away. During the day, these skies are always gray. The roadside fast food stalls have stolen the starlight and begun to use it to sell burgers to families of four, ‘just passing through’ on their way somewhere identical to places they’ve never been before, yet have experienced three-hundred-sixty-five times over. 

America, America, America—a medley of vaguely rectangular lands, green signs and brown rivers for borders, separating only more of the same, differentiated exclusively by the local waitress’s accent. Waffle House. CVS. Target. Walmart. BAIL BONDS. Middle schools of the same old copied-and-pasted brick layouts; dry, pimply kids who hide their braces by refusing to smile, dragging themselves into the barren hell of closed-mouth yearbook pictures and mechanical pencils with broken lead. Another vandalized VOTE FOR sign on the way to a distant family member’s one-story house: Nowhere, Nowhere.

Road sign: “DO YOU BELIEVE IN GOD?”

Road sign: Gentlemen’s Club, 24.5 miles north.

America, America, America, you are stolen constellations and broken promises and empty paper receipts. You are shattered dreams and fools-gold opportunities, an advertisement of candy-coated arsenic to the rest of the world. You are good people and bad people who think they are good. Guns and murdered children. Insidious, infectious desert. Amber Waves of Grain, Land of the Brave, you are a wasteland waiting to happen.

I hadn’t been happy since the last Chanukah, three months ago, and it looked like I was about to be upset for about nine more. I had the bathroom sink running as I stared, horrified, at the positive pregnancy test in my hand. I began to shake. Quickly, as if to pretend nothing had ever happened—if only for a moment—I threw the test down, washed my quivering hands, and shut off the faucet. 

My new fiancé, Joseph Davidovitch, was outside in my living room, watching hockey. We’d been together for about a month now—an arranged pairing, as per tradition—although the wedding had been delayed due to a series of mishaps within our families. No problem. Awkwardness wasn’t exactly an issue, as he and I had been friends for years, we still lived apart, and the marriage itself wasn’t unwanted. But again, all ceremonial proceedings had been delayed. We had not consummated. Joseph was still a virgin. 

Maybe I had freaked out at the notion of marriage, though I had no real problem with Joseph; for the life of me, however, I could not yet bring myself to see him as any more than a friend. The day our families informed us we would soon be engaged, I felt a sprout of panic spring up within me—I only had a brief amount of time left to be on my own, to explore outside the confines of wedlock. 

Technically, I hadn’t cheated. 

But I basically did. 

I had to own up to it. It was the right thing to do. “Joseph,” I called from the bathroom doorway. He looked at me, his brown eyes yet to be crushed by the news. With shaking hands, I beckoned him off the couch, and grabbed the pregnancy test from the bathroom counter behind me. I showed it to him. 

Honestly, I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe I’d hoped he’d be more forgiving, or at least less outwardly enraged. The first thing he did was ask, “Who?” And I couldn’t form the father’s name. Then he demanded my phone. My heart jumped with fear. 

“Wait, just—can we just pretend? Pretend like—”

“What?” he shouted. “That I was the one who got you pregnant? Lie?”

I nodded, teary-eyed. 

He huffed. “Fine. It looks like that’s really the only option if we want to keep living our lives.” He lowered his face to mine, and glared. “But I know. And I will not stand by.” Joseph marched into my bedroom and snatched my phone off the nightstand. Crying, I told him my password. 

For about five minutes, he scrolled through my apps, finally landing on Instagram. He did the fateful thing—entered my DMs. I heard him laugh triumphantly, angrily, through his nose. “I guess this is him, huh. Ah, and these messages are from the day you and I got together. He gave you his address and everything.” He showed me the text logs, which I had already seen. “Thanks for making it so easy, Mary. I know exactly where to find this asshole.” 

He stormed out, threw on his coat, and headed to the front door. “Joseph!” I yelled after him. “It’s not his fault, okay? Please don’t do anything stupid!” 

He turned back to me, fuming. “Me? Do something stupid?” Joseph showed me the phone again, this time the man’s profile (@gangel1225) pulled up, displaying a photo of his beautiful face. “This is stupid. You’ve already crossed that line. I’m only joining you.” 

I tried yelling after him again, but it was futile. I followed him out onto the chilly Midwood, Brooklyn sidewalk, hurrying reluctantly, humiliated, to Gabriel DiAngelo’s apartment. 

It wasn’t very far. That was how he and I had met in the first place—we ran into each other constantly: at the grocery store, delis, while gardening and jogging. With a sick feeling in my throat, I could only think about how a piece of him was now growing inside my body. He came only once, but unfortunately, he had stayed. 

Minutes later, Joseph was ringing Gabriel’s doorbell like a madman and yelling into the com for the motherfucker to come down already. I stood by the waist-high wrought iron fence lining the block, trying to calm down, hoping that Gabriel wasn’t home. Joseph was being so loud that three old women, who still had their Christmas lights up and had been tending to their gardens nearby, came to observe the chaos. “Hey, sweetheart,” said one of them, approaching me. “Are you alright? What’s going on?” 

Tears were still red on my face. I wasn’t wearing a coat, either, and seeing that it was still early March, the cold was biting. I could barely get the words out, but I managed bits and pieces: “Fiancé… pregnant… didn’t mean to… tried to stop him, but…” I hiccupped again. The second of the three women patted my back, and was about to respond when suddenly the door to Gabriel’s apartment complex opened, and the guy himself stepped out. 

Gabriel DiAngelo had lush blond hair full of loose curls, and smooth, sunned skin which complimented the angles of his jaw and the lashes of his dark green eyes. A silver ring was pierced to the middle of his lower lip. He was wearing a black jacket over a white collared shirt, tight black pants, and black boots. He looked like a modern Greek statue. I didn’t feel too guilty admitting I had been lucky, now that I saw him again. 

“What in God’s name is your problem?” was what Gabriel said first. Even his voice was heavenly!

Joseph was standing on the stoop just barely two feet from him. He sized up Gabriel, though they were both around the same height and age, and continued to grimace as Gabriel shut the door behind him, swinging his keychain around his finger. 

“I heard you forged a pretty strong bond with my fiancée,” said Joseph. “Am I right?” 

Gabriel pocketed his keys and frowned. “Who are you talking about?” 

“I’m talking about Mary Nazareth, dipshit.”

“Oh. Her.” Gabriel’s perfect smile stretched brightly over his face with an air of competition. “I didn’t know she was engaged, but yeah… I guess you could put it like that.” 

“Put it like—” Joseph seethed and finally pushed Gabriel back into the front door, causing a hard, metallic rattling sound. “She’s pregnant, asshole! What the fuck’s wrong with you?” 

“Fuck’s wrong with you, man?” Gabriel said, pulling his jacket back over his shoulder with a snap. “She’s pregnant? Wha— we could have just talked this out, but it doesn’t seem like you’d be smart enough to listen. You know, I can see why she doesn’t want to be with you.” 

Joseph charged again. “You motherf—” Before he could land a punch, Gabriel threw a kick that sent him tumbling down the brownstone stairs, rolling hard onto the pavement. He stood up quickly, blinking away the pain, and dusted himself off. Gabriel jumped down off the stoop. They continued fighting. Pedestrians parted for them, or stood and watched, in awe. I, on the other hand, wished I could have been anywhere other than here. 

The longer I watched this idiotic brawl, the three wise old women at my side, the more I realized the two guys were equally stupid, and I had no desire for either of them anymore—not emotionally for Joseph, nor physically for Gabriel. At least not as much. 

Of course, I had been in the wrong for betraying Joseph’s trust, not telling him from the get-go what I’d done. It was against tradition for me to sleep around anyway. That was all on me. But at least I’d tried to set things right, admit what I’d done when it counted, talk. But Joseph hadn’t even tried to listen, and now he was making a fool of both of us. He had been overly protective of me from the moment our parents even hinted at our engagement; the slightest notion of my having personal freedom sent him into heated anxiety. At first I thought it was endearing. I didn’t hate it and I trusted him because he was my friend. We used to play hockey together.

That was the thing, though—he wasn’t just my friend anymore. We were supposed to be married. He would never be the same Joseph I had known; now, there was only this overprotective, volatile idiot currently trying to beat the life out of our neighbor in the middle of the street—which, by the way, he was not doing a very good job of. 

Joseph threw a punch, Gabriel blocked it and kneed Joseph in the stomach. Joseph kicked, Gabriel dodged, though tripped a little bit, and kept on. It didn’t seem like he was taking any of it very seriously, either, which equally annoyed me. He occasionally laughed or said asinine things like, “I strike you with the hand of God!” which was followed by him simply moving out of the way so that the sun would blind Joseph, allowing for a dumb-looking chop to hit my fiancé on the head. 

I was so done with this. As of now, I didn’t know what I would do about the pregnancy—I didn’t want to abort—maybe I’d escape the engagement, or at least have the baby somewhere else, like Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where a friend of mine lived… but I could worry about that in December.

Either way, my tears had dried, and my patience was up.

“Screw it,” I said. The old women around me somehow read my tone perfectly and began heading in the opposite direction of the fight, bringing me along with them. 

“You look hungry, dear,” said the first. “Some food will warm you up.” She offered me her hand. 

“You must be warm on the way to the restaurant, too, though,” said the second, uncoiling her scarf from her neck and offering it to me. Hesitantly, though gratefully, I wrapped it around my own collar. It smelled good, like frankincense. 

“I’ve got coupons to Li’s,” said the third, pulling four little red-and-gold tickets out of her snakeskin purse. 

“You’re all too kind,” I said. 

“Oh, you flatter us,” said the one with the purse. “We just know what’s best for you.” 

Above us, the sun looked brighter than it had ever been. Sometimes I had to remember that it was a real star burning up there, not much different from all the others which peeked out of the darkness at night. 

Meanwhile, Joseph and Gabriel both fell to the ground, panting and bruised with exhaustion. They cursed incessantly at each other, resorting to verbal insults now that their muscles had been turned to jelly and blood was streaming from their noses. Just as Gabriel got out his third, “You fucking virgin,” he glanced over at where Mary had been standing, but she was gone, along with the three old women who had accompanied her. 

“Where’d she go?” he asked. 

Irritated but curious, Joseph looked over his shoulder and realized as well that his fiancée had abandoned the scene. “That bitch,” he spat. 

It was warm in Li’s Kosher Chinese restaurant. The wise old women and I had ordered peking duck and were sipping hot jasmine tea. We had buns and plates of green vegetables and rice. One of the women used her coupons to pay for the meal. When we were done, the waiter offered us four fortune cookies. 

I took mine, cracked it open, and while chewing on the cookie I read the message: ON DECEMBER 25TH, YOU WILL GIVE BIRTH TO BABY CHRIST. Swallowing, I mumbled, “I’m not naming my baby Chris,” and threw the fortune in the trash can. 

They ate my island. 

For a while, imperialism had always seemed like a far-away concept, a series of atrocities committed a hundred years ago, until I saw it broadcasted right before my eyes: a home I’d never gotten the chance to visit being overtaken as I watched helplessly from my couch, where those foreign governments could never touch me. 

I wondered—did anyone sharing my blood get hurt in those protests, fighting to defend the identity and integrity of their home? Was it their screams echoing all the way here that were causing this mad vibration deep in my bones, making tears of fire spill from my eyes? My people sang songs of freedom, opened their umbrellas against the rapid, insidious spittle of rubber and tear gas, and whispered rebellious slogans under their breath. Even so, their voices reached me ever so softly, loud as a typhoon, all the way across the sea. 

And those who will never understand ask me why I agonize—why I sob for a family I’ve never met, as the place I’d always heard was vibrant, filled with the clanging of bells and shouts of food venders, is reduced to a mirage of itself, a mere grasp at what it was, the light in the city's eyes slowly rotting to a slough; my people lost the battle they fought so hard that their voices were lost to quiet rasps.

Somewhere in that city, a gas mask lays on the street beside a can of asphyxiant, and people will dismiss that, merely, a chemist had been doing graffiti. 

It’s not like they tell you. It’s not like the movies.

They ate my island.

From what I’ve seen, things are really much bigger out here than on the East Coast—that is, too much spaghetti on my plate. Aside from this there are vast canyons that dip down as far or farther than sections of the ocean I have ever tried to comprehend, and deserts dotted with sharp brown-green bushes which sprawl away into the mountainous horizon in petrified sand dunes, stone, and dry golden earth. Highways have been carved into hot red valleys and the occasional river snakes through the land like a beacon for desperate verdant life, a long, thin, strip of an oasis. 

The most abundant bird I have come across has been the crow. Very surprisingly, I have seen its jet-black wings soaring at a leisurely pace, yet with the spirit of secretive urgency, through the burning cloudless sky, looking for friends and eventually finding them among the dead gray trees or sand-brushed rocks upon the canyonside.

At night, when far from one of those rare small towns sneaking out of the sand like some hungry, suicidal flat-backed beast, its spine full of fluorescent lights and Shell Oil signs, you can see the stars, white freckles on endlessly black skin, and their distances from each other, their magnitudes, as if you are looking up at a giant fish tank from down below, glowing bulbs swimming slowly and noiselessly, beautifully apathetic. The desert is so silent that your ears pop in perplexity; it’s as if they’ve never heard a quiet so quiet before (and you haven’t). Not even a scrape of wind manages to sufficiently penetrate this perpetual muzzle on Mother Earth’s voice. 

This is, as indicated, a suicidal place, oil derricks and salt lake arsenic, uranium, a city revolving around some 19th Century prophet so-and-so (oh, how the desert misses the bloodstained ropes of the Avenging Angels), gaping copper mines littering the Promise Land’s landscape, letting the life bleed out of the earth so we can satisfy our own immediate and ultimately superficial needs which will, in the end, kill us both in a slow and bloodless way, cold and dry and lacking in all nutrients the way a venomous Chupicabra slays the farmer’s goat. 

And still, in a sense, there is something unbearably lovely about it. Someone once said (I can’t remember who it was now), “Everything is more beautiful when you are doomed,” or something along those lines. So maybe this is what it means to be mortal. We are little enigmatic amoebas scooting though the matter of this cellular universe, looking only to ourselves no matter the cost because we know we are always on the edge of retribution—we insist that our home come with us, poison and all, because this life, this land, is all we have ever known. 

We are like sand falling through fingers.

The field was brittle from the drought. By the first touch of autumn—always gray down there—Andy Higgins’s whole garden had died, so that meant it was fair game for us. 

My brothers and I marched out, heads heavy with bored anticipation, and due to the bleak, chilly weather, decided to fall back on our default adventure: playing survival. With this came the added benefit of warmth.

Ryan gathered bunches of dead leaves, I got the twigs, and Finch arranged these big sheets of chicken wire so our fire would be contained among the skeletal brown tomato plants and bunches of ghostly rosemary. 

Ryan struck my mom’s old cigarette lighter and, fanning our newborn child with our calloused tween hands, dirt under our fingernails, we smiled; we were Surviving.

Then we heard a shout. Andy Higgins: “What the hell are y’all doing?” His words dripped with the familiarly monstrous venom of a wrathful next-door neighbor. It sent happy chills up our spines. 

The moment he trudged out—a fifty-something Republican with hands like big pink knots, red-faced and camo-capped (with a son at UGA who worked selling Christmas trees at Southern Belle Farms in the winter)—we took off through the gap in the fence. On the edge of the garden’s borders, a black rubber longhorn face hung ominously, some trophy of fictitious hunting escapades. 

Andy shouted rapturous warnings up at us as we sped up the drought-ravaged hill. Our house crested the dying grass, the oxygen stew of that silvery weekend wind whipping in our grinning little lungs. 

At that moment—really, entirely, and truly—I felt like a boy.

He walks in a slow meander. He takes whichever road is longest and he wears whatever makes him feel cleanest and the closest to earth. At night, he sits on a blanket up on the roof and smokes—cigars, or rolled cigarettes, never pens or Marlboros or Spirits—but he doesn’t inhale, to keep healthy while savoring the bitter taste of mild urban masculinity. 

The moon shines on him and keeps the smoke from soaking into his clothes. He owns black dogs and spotted cats. He wears tweed and corduroy and reasonably-priced leather and reading glasses; sometimes a hat. Black or white or brown—all of it. It goes with the coffee tone of his skin. His hair, despite age, is still on his head, cropped close and black and curly. His shadow is a long-necked bird. In the moonlight it cranes upward and stretches its wings. When he smokes and watches the exhale drift to the silver disk above, he does not miss the days when people would notice. 

He listens to jazz and only dances when he’s finished a day’s work and the shadows get long outside in his King’s golden rays. 

Very rarely, and never planned, he brings home a man or a woman from a mellow-beat bar whose mind he’s taken an interest to. He will accompany his guest in scanning his bookshelves and they will discuss the world for hours on end, until his guest becomes tired; in which case, he invites them to the roof, where he’s laid the woven blanket out to smoke. The moon becomes brighter when they emerge on top. Silver glistens on both of their skins. He offers them his hand and if his guest wants to make love, they do. If they agree to turn into moonlight when he offers it, he turns them to moonlight. In the morning, either way, he writes. 

He goes for a walk along the longest street and listens to jazz. He goes up and smokes but doesn’t inhale. The moon whispers, urges him to unfold his wings once more. Sometimes he does. Other times he simply blows smoke rings that circle the lunar orb and hang there, dimming the starlight for a moment or two, and he laughs. His laugh sounds like teakwood and desert wind. Gold glistens on the rims of his glasses. His smile is like the flame upon an ancient library. His eyes glimmer with a sense of transcendence from the depression that results from endless wisdom—the knowledge that we, on Earth, are doomed to failure, and mischief in that he knows exactly how and when that irredeemable blunder will occur (it will happen slowly and it has already begun), but alongside a kindness that refuses to share those discoveries with anyone else—not even the Sun or the Sand or the Moon. Only he and his shadow, the ibis, know. 

He does not need anyone else. But, like anyone sensible, he knows that he should nurture other hearts inside his own, so as to not go sour. He walks in a meander because he knows gods should not stay in one place for too long, and he listens to jazz because he knows that gods should keep happy for the sake of all things that live. He smokes without inhaling because he knows that there is always simplicity woven into the pattern of complexity, and he does everything because he knows everything should be done, at one point or another before the end of the world.

Sometimes you feel like a heap of garbage strewn to the sidewalk, obstructing the passersby' paths, ruining the road they so love and need, yearning for sorrow with every sad song you play like a cat yearns for the subject of its curiosity. Unfortunately I’ve written about this ad nauseum and so I wish to cure the mold my brain has accumulated over the course of so many English classes, which I will do now. What I’ve realized is this: sometimes you feel like garbage in order to feel like the thing you have lost when you feel like garbage. What I mean is, I wish to discuss these little in-between moments of mindless, chaotic, sunlight-filled pleasure which keep you afloat during those garbage times. The first begins with frustration. 

In seventh grade my band director had been conducting us to play in this county-wide musical competition. Our song was really nice—it was not called Arabian Nights, but it was something to that effect, in the minor key. However, because this piece was so great, I beat myself up about it for weeks. Oh, my reed was getting too old, my music stand kept sinking, this and that, one or the other. But, as they say, the show must go on. The night of the performance, our band director gave us a pep talk outside the Performing Arts Center, “the PAC”, and we all went inside with blended bellies and roaring ears. All forty-or-so of us waited backstage while the massive Ola Middle School band played their college-level piece in their neat suits and dresses like always, and at last old Union Grove Middle tramped out on stage, clad in sporty polo shirts and black pants, forever the underdog, forever forgettable. But not tonight.

I did not play perfectly, but I realized while I tapped my foot and gazed into the crowd as the stage lights shone into my eyes, otherwise blotched with the darkness of the arena and the square whiteness of my sheet music, that I was absolutely, terribly, irreversibly in love with this. It was just fun. The immense vibrations of all the people who had been working just as hard as I had were reverberating all around me—Kyla, Carine, and Mary with their flutes jumping in at just the right time, Sarah soothing into her alto sax, Jojo Price’s fingers fluttering over the keys of his clarinet, Shane meticulously teasing the cymbal at just the right timbre, the trumpets blaring… Even though we were not perfect, we sounded great, and I realized—how silly of me not to, before—that we were all in this together, scared, and brilliant in the end. I don’t play the oboe anymore, but every time I hear one, I smile. 

Sometimes, the best music doesn’t come from an instrument at all. When I was young my siblings and I would go down to the creek behind our house and listen to the water babble. We’d march through ribbons of red clay and slippery rocks, salamanders skipping through the lucid shallows, looking for monsters and pieces of tin. My brother, Ryan, was usually the one leading us all on, because he considered himself the bravest. He and I were the same age, so we were always competing, while the two youngest trailed behind us. (Our older sister never cared to participate.) Once my younger brother tried to jump over a ravine and fell right into the water, so we’d had to help him out, soaking wet and everything. Luckily he was alright. We each had our own territories—mine was in the hollow of a waterside tree—and would try to start wars with each other when we trespassed on someone else’s land. We talked about wendigos and white-tailed deer. 

When we got older, we stopped thinking of that forest as such a magical place, especially because we are all split up now and no one lives in that house but a big, blond villain, but a few summers ago I found myself down there with my brother and a friend, and we trekked so far down the creek that we discovered a wide, gray river. Somehow, despite all those years of exploration, I had not known there was a river in that spot. Quietly, so they wouldn’t hear my sentimentality, I said, “The creek has grown up, too.”

However, no sense of joy has made me feel more grown-up than the first time a boy said to me, with a pointed smile, “We should hang out more often.” At the time, I was sixteen—pretty late for something like that to happen for the first time, I know, but I wasn't exactly the most conventional-looking person, so it was a very big deal. I asked him to watch Coraline with me at the school movie night last December. He said of course—it was his first time seeing it. So we went. Afterwards, when it was dark and cold out, we took a walk through Prospect Park on my way home. We talked about Breaking Bad and communism. 

He suggested that we visit the giant mulch pit to lay down, and I said, “Cool,” so we did. 

Honestly, nothing really happened, but we did lie down beside each other and watch the bare, black silhouettes of curling trees swaying against the canvas of that night sky, the stars like alien peepholes, and he put his head on my chest and said, “Your heart’s beating really fast.” 

I said, “It’s shivering.” 

Now, every time I see him in the halls, I avoid him like the plague, but despite this unfortunate turn of events, whenever I think of that night, my heart shivers again. 

But who needs romance? Feeling grown-up is for kids. A sandy beach strewn with old dime bags, rushing waves, a rusty roller coaster in the background, and a chilled, gross raspberry White Claw is all I need. At the end of our Junior year, some friends and I visited this utopia of ours. Kaiya supplied the White Claws and Elena brandished her speaker, putting on our favorite song, Hot in Herre. And we did, indeed, take off (some of) our clothes. The water is freezing in June, that’s for sure, but that wasn’t the point. It was over. God, it was over. Since I was ten, people had been telling me, “Just wait until Junior year. That’s when you’ll learn the true definition of suffering.” That and the definition of the Missouri Compromise. (Hello, Maine!) And it was done.

On February 28th, I had gone to the hospital for suicidal ideation. I stayed there for a while, a little into March, and had come back anxious but with a strange new mental lens; in the hospital, I had experienced several days of “non-life”. Blank walls. No windows. No showers. No talking. Waiting. Waiting. Etcetera. Now, I was surrounded by the sounds of seagulls singing above me, saltwater washing against my bare shins, the laughter of my friends on the beach, and Nelly singing, It’s getting hot in here (so hot)! So take off all your clothes! The waves were glittering in the sunset and the wet sand was cool and rocky underfoot. This was life. This was what I had survived to see. And I could go on: once, I ate an orange with iced coffee. Once, I boarded the train on a sunny day.

Of course, we feel like garbage, and of course, for a lot of us, those intervals of store-brand, whole wheat misery hold the majority, but we must remember that there is more to life than just those depressing integers, counting one after the other, into infinity. We must remember that there is an infinity between each whole number, as well, filled to the brim with chaos, mystery, and joy. Not necessarily for heaven’s sake, but rather for our own, we must remember to count our blessings, too.

Autumn. I was young and you younger, yet you were somehow much older than me, in grace and style and the way you regarded the world and other people. We stood leaning forward on the rusted railing of the Gowanus Canal with pandemic Brooklyn at our backs. 

Never could I smell the "constant" trash that tourists complain about when they come to New York — of course, occasionally it’s there, but maybe I’ve just learned to tough through it. Here, I smelled old gum, freshwater, cigarettes, sweets, smoke, and trees. To me, it smelled like nighttime. 

I do not like Gowanus. It’s dirty, ugly, spaced-out, and requires much inconvenient commuting. But that night, I loved it. The water beneath our boots was black, like oil, gleaming rarely with ripples and small waves the color of mother-of-pearl in the street lights. Soda cans drifted lazily. We could see Manhattan across the river. Its lights and active windows were like diamonds strewn over dark earth, all in a row, a ditch in the road. The wind was soft and wet.

I stifled a cough. Embarrassing. We were encompassed by the city, but at that time people were generally sparse, especially at night, so although masked pedestrians meandered randomly behind us and up and down the canal nearby, I felt comfortably alone with you. 

Still, you are so much more than just yourself. You are the world you inhabit. Each room molds to your presence, slow and quiet and full of colors no one has ever seen before, though they all coalesce and come out, for some reason, as yellow. I couldn’t believe you were real.

Your eyes were the hue of the river at night, the same mother-of-pearl gleams on the waves were glints in your gaze. Somehow you made cigarettes smell good. And you made Miles Davis sound like your footsteps and your smoky exhale and the swish of your long skirt on your boots and kicked-up autumn leaves. Somehow you made me collapse into love with you. And we didn’t even say anything at all.