[...]

Six months after the last time you wrote, I got an e-mail from you. I deleted it, then a half hour later opened up my trash and read it. You were in the hospital again, and would I please come quickly.

I drove all night from Virginia to the city. It had been a year and a half since the last time I saw you, and I wasn’t even close to being clear of you. I cursed you every day, at every unoccupied second. Crying at traffic lights. Furious while I folded my laundry. So lonely at breakfast. Looking at baby photos on Facebook. I woke up in the mornings with my jaw aching, my teeth slowly turning to powder.

The road that night pulsed with twice-reflected light, sun to moon, moon to asphalt, and the lights on I-95 washed out the stars I’d grown up with, made them distant and indecipherable. The cities along the way, once friends of mine, shimmered at a distance, and my highway brother spoke some dialect of rubber and pavement that I’d never heard. I felt far from myself, an alien looking down at a planet made of water and concrete.