When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?

How I fled my shitty high school to spend my days in New York lost in library stacks, reading obscure texts by dead people, most of whom never dreamed a face like mine floating over their sentences—and least of all that those sentences would save me. But none of that matters now. What matters is that all of it, even if I didn’t know it then, brought me here, to this page, to tell you everything you’ll never know.

Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.

Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?

I’m not telling you a story so much as a shipwreck—the pieces floating, finally legible.