Realizing, too late, that it’s useless to show up unannounced at a dead boy’s house to be greeted only by his grief-fucked father, I keep walking. I reach the corner of Harris and Magnolia, where I turn, out of habit or possession, into the park, cross the three baseball fields, the earth rising up musty and fresh beneath my boots. Rain in my hair, down my face, shirt collar. I hurry toward the street on the other side of the park, follow it down to the cul-de-sac, where the house sits, so grey the rain almost claims it, rubbing its edges into weather.

At the front steps, I take the keys from my bag and jostle the door open. It’s nearly midnight. The house sends over me a sheet of warmth, mixed with the sweet musk of old clothes. Everything quiet. The living room TV hums on mute, its blue washes over the empty couch, a half-eaten bag of peanuts on the seat. I shut off the TV, walk up the stairs, turn toward the room. The door’s ajar, revealing the glow of a clamshell night-light. I push it open. You’re lying, not on your bed, but on the floor, on a mat made of folded blankets. Your work at the nail salon has left your back so badly strained the bed has gotten too soft to hold your joints in place through a night’s sleep.

I crawl next to you on the mat. Rain, collected in my hair, falls and blotches your white sheets. I lie down, facing the bed, my back to your back. You startle awake.

“What? What are you doing? My god, you’re wet . . . your clothes, Little Dog . . . what? What’s going on?” You sit up, pull my face to you. “What happened to you?” I shake my head, smile stupidly.

You search me for answers, for cuts, feeling my pockets, under my shirt.

Slowly, you lie down on your side. The space between us thin and cold as a windowpane. I turn away—even if what I want most is to tell you everything.

It’s in these moments, next to you, that I envy words for doing what we can never do—how they can tell all of themselves simply by standing still, simply by being. Imagine I could lie down beside you and my whole body, every cell, radiates a clear, singular meaning, not so much a writer as a word pressed down beside you.

There’s a word Trevor once told me about, one he learned from Buford, who served in the navy in Hawaii during the Korean War: kipuka. The piece of land that’s spared after a lava flow runs down the slope of a hill—an island formed from what survives the smallest apocalypse. Before the lava descended, scorching the moss along the hill, that piece of land was insignificant, just another scrap in an endless mass of green. Only by enduring does it earn its name. Lying on the mat with you, I cannot help but want us to be our own kipuka, our own aftermath, visible. But I know better.

You place a sticky hand on my neck: lavender lotion. Rain drums the gutters along the house. “What is it, Little Dog? You can tell me. Come on, you’re making me scared.”

“I hate him, Ma,” I whisper in English, knowing the words seal you off from me. “I hate him. I hate him.” And I start to cry.

“Please, I don’t know what you’re saying. What is that?”

I reach back, clutching two of your fingers, and press my face into the dark slot under the bed. On the far end, near the wall, too far for anyone to reach, beside an empty water bottle, a single sock crumpled and filmed with dust. Hello.

Dear Ma—

* * *

Let me begin again.

* * *

I am writing because it’s late.

* * *

Because it’s 9:52 p.m. on a Tuesday and you must be walking home after the closing shift.

* * *

I’m not with you ’cause I’m at war. Which is one way of saying it’s already February and the president wants to deport my friends. It’s hard to explain.

* * *

For the first time in a long time, I’m trying to believe in heaven, in a place we can be together after all this blows over up.

* * *

They say every snowflake is different—but the blizzard, it covers us all the same. A friend in Norway told me a story about a painter who went out during a storm, searching for the right shade of green, and never returned.

* * *

I’m writing you because I’m not the one leaving, but the one coming back, empty-handed.

* * *

—

You once asked me what it means to be a writer. So here goes.

* * *

Seven of my friends are dead. Four from overdoses. Five, if you count Xavier who flipped his Nissan doing ninety on a bad batch of fentanyl.

* * *

I don’t celebrate my birthday anymore.

* * *

Take the long way home with me. Take the left on Walnut, where you’ll see the Boston Market where I worked for a year when I was seventeen (after the tobacco farm). Where the Evangelical boss—the one with nose pores so large, biscuit crumbs from his lunch would get lodged in them—never gave us any breaks. Hungry on a seven-hour shift, I’d lock myself in the broom closet and stuff my mouth with cornbread I snuck in my black, standard-issue apron.

* * *

Trevor was put on OxyContin after breaking his ankle doing dirt bike jumps in the woods a year before I met him. He was fifteen.

* * *

OxyContin, first mass-produced by Purdue Pharma in 1996, is an opioid, essentially making it heroin in pill form.

* * *

I never wanted to build a “body of work,” but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work.

* * *

Take it or leave it. The body, I mean.

* * *

Take a left on Harris St., where all that’s left of the house that burned down that summer during a thunderstorm is a chain-linked dirt lot.

* * *

The truest ruins are not written down. The girl Grandma knew back in Go Cong, the one whose sandals were cut from the tires of a burned-out army jeep, who was erased by an air strike three weeks before the war ended—she’s a ruin no one can point to. A ruin without location, like a language.

* * *

After a month on the Oxy, Trevor’s ankle healed, but he was a full-blown addict.

* * *

—

In a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly. Once, after my fourteenth birthday, crouched between the seats of an abandoned school bus in the woods, I filled my life with a line of cocaine. A white letter “I” glowed on the seat’s peeling leather. Inside me the “I” became a switchblade—and something tore. My stomach forced up but it was too late. In minutes, I became more of myself. Which is to say the monstrous part of me got so large, so familiar, I could want it. I could kiss it.

* * *

The truth is none of us are enough enough. But you know this already.

* * *

The truth is I came here hoping for a reason to stay.

* * *

Sometimes those reasons are small: the way you pronounce spaghetti as “bahgeddy.”

* * *

It’s late in the season—which means the winter roses, in full bloom along the national bank, are suicide notes.

* * *

Write that down.

* * *

They say nothing lasts forever but they’re just scared it will last longer than they can love it.

* * *

Are you there? Are you still walking?

* * *

They say nothing lasts forever and I’m writing you in the voice of an endangered species.

* * *

The truth is I’m worried they will get us before they get us.

* * *

Tell me where it hurts. You have my word.

* * *

—

    Back in Hartford, I used to wander the streets at night by myself. Sleepless, I’d get dressed, climb through the window—and just walk.

* * *

Some nights I would hear an animal shuffling, unseen, behind garbage bags, or the wind unexpectedly strong overhead, a rush of leaves clicking down, the scrape of branches from a maple out of sight. But mostly, there were only my footsteps on the pavement steaming with fresh rain, the scent of decade-old tar, or the dirt on a baseball field under a few stars, the gentle brush of grass on the soles of my Vans on a highway median.

* * *

But one night I heard something else.

* * *

Through the lightless window of a street-level apartment, a man’s voice in Arabic. I recognized the word Allah. I knew it was a prayer by the tone he used to lift it, as if the tongue was the smallest arm from which a word like that could be offered. I imagined it floating above his head as I sat there on the curb, waiting for the soft clink I knew was coming. I wanted the word to fall, like a screw in a guillotine, but it didn’t. His voice, it went higher and higher, and my hands, they grew pinker with each inflection. I watched my skin intensify until, at last, I looked up—and it was dawn. It was over. I was blazed in the blood of light.

* * *

Salat al-fajr: a prayer before sunrise. “Whoever prays the dawn prayer in congregation,” said the Prophet Muhammad, “it is as if he had prayed the whole night long.”

* * *

I want to believe, walking those aimless nights, that I was praying. For what I’m still not sure. But I always felt it was just ahead of me. That if I walked far enough, long enough, I would find it—perhaps even hold it up, like a tongue at the end of its word.

* * *

—

First developed as a painkiller for cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, OxyContin, along with its generic forms, was soon prescribed for all bodily pain: arthritis, muscle spasms, and migraines.

* * *