I did ache when I said goodbye to the friends I’d made. I ached when I said goodbye to my grandparents, to my cousins, to my aunts, to my mother. I ached for lasting connection, for a place where rejection was not inevitable. No matter how many times I stood on bare floors, surrounded by blank walls, telling myself I belonged everywhere and to everyone, emptied houses never stopped feeling like ruin. Failing to fully belong in my father’s family, and my mother’s, never stopped feeling like disgrace.

My room was a desert because it was barren. True, it was filled with books, photographs, clothes, lotions, hair creams, perfumes, a bed with a firm mattress, blankets knitted by my grandmother, bad paintings, candles, old letters, and new shoes. But those things had lost their meaning. It was as though they belonged to someone else whose life I had been dropped into, whose life I wouldn’t have minded torching until it was nothing but ashes.

Three weeks after Trevor died a trio of tulips in an earthenware pot stopped me in the middle of my mind. I had woken abruptly and, still dazed from sleep, mistook the dawn light hitting the petals for the flowers emitting their own luminescence. I crawled to the glowing cups, thinking I was seeing a miracle, my own burning bush. But when I got closer, my head blocked the rays and the tulips turned off. This also means nothing, I know. But some nothings change everything after them.

She stands up from the sofa perhaps to go get a glass of water from the kitchen and at just that moment I enter the living room. I walk up to her and bring my face close to hers. Our arms hang at our sides. Love is stunned into silence. She runs her hand along the scar on my forearm. I rest my right cheek on her right cheek. Our faces are the same warm temperature and I remain there for almost a full minute. We remain there, standing with our cheeks touching, in contact but without pressure.

She places her hand on my fist. Her hand covers my fist. I let my hand fall open. She moves her hand down and crosses her wrist against mine and now I’m almost asleep. When and where were you happiest? My one remaining contact with wakefulness is the flat inside of her wrist resting on the flat inside of mine, as though each wrist were seeking the other’s pulse. I listen for the soft beat of blood through the skin. I listen as best as I can in the dimming stillness. I slow my breathing and soon I hear nothing.