Nothing was neutral, there was always something attached to it, clinging to it, triggering, pulling, insisting, asking her to look, telling her not to forget. She’d tried explaining this one to Adam, but he had shaken his head and insisted that she was going to exhaust herself, that it sounded like she was living several lives at once, all stacked up on her, weighing her down, bottoming her out. Waleed had understood, a little. He had told her it was the same for him, to walk through the city was to walk with ghosts.

I was fascinated by place because no place had ever belonged to me; nor had I ever belonged to any place. That was also why, as a child, I was fascinated by the body. Perhaps, I thought, I could belong inside my own body. Perhaps I could know the streams of the veins in my wrists the way other people knew the streams in which they swam as children. Perhaps I could know the names of the bones in the back of my hand the way other people knew the names of the back roads that were shortcuts home. I could know the rhythm of my pulse like my friend Dan knew the rhythm of the approaching train in his hometown, the rhythm he woke up to and went to sleep to and hoped would lead him somewhere else someday. I never did get to know my body that way.

While his father scanned the shelves, sliding the books one by one into the gaps from which they’d come, Bird ran his fingertips over the embossed spines where gilt lettering had long been rubbed away, breathing in the peculiar smell of the library: a mix of dust and leather and melted vanilla ice cream. Warm, like the scent of someone’s skin.

It soothed him and unsettled him at the same time, the murky hush like a wool blanket thrown over everything. Underneath, something large lying in wait. It never ended, the stacks of books needing to be set back in place, the constant insistent reiteration of order, and the thought was dizzying: that just beyond this shelf there were hundreds more, thousands of books, millions of words.

She was always doing that, telling him stories. Prying open cracks for magic to seep in, making the world a place of possibility. After she left, he had stopped believing all those fantasies. Wispy, false dreams that disintegrated in the morning’s light. Now it occurs to him that, perhaps, there might be truth in them after all.

It takes him a long time, but he finds it. Pressed down into the dirt, teeth edged with rust. But it is there, hard and solid and real in his hand. It still fits in the lock, still clicks when he turns it, still draws the bolt back so he can turn the knob and step through.

And he understands, then, how it’s going to go. How he’ll find her again. What he’s going to do next, alongside everything else his life will bring. Somewhere out there are people who still know her poems, who’ve hidden scraps of them away in the folds of their minds before setting match to the papers in their hands. He will find them, he will ask them what they remember, he will piece together their recollections, fragmentary and incomplete though they may be, mapping the holes of one against the solid patches of another, and in this way, piece by piece, he will set her back down on paper again.

Yes, please, he says. I would like that, very much.