When Harry got the hamster, I drove her to pick up an old cage from her parents’ house. I carefully neglected to ask her how many furry residents had lived and died in that cage over the course of her childhood. That was the only time I met her parents. She introduced me as her friend Jane, which was true because we’d stopped sleeping together at the time. I was fucking women I met on Tinder, who I made sleep on the couch if they stayed over, because I couldn’t stand sharing my bed, hated unfamiliar limbs sweating on my body. It felt like the thing to do to make these girls breakfast in the morning, but I never learned how to cook, so breakfast was microwaved packets of oatmeal or a rubbery egg on toast. Harry said she was taking a break from sex for a while, with anyone. She didn’t want to talk about what happened with the girlfriend.

That’s when I was thinking of getting a tattoo. A girl I’d been hooking up with told me that tattoos were a good way to feel in control of your body. Her body was covered in them, and firm and blunt as a knife hilt, very within her control. I thought maybe some poetry. During classes I would screenshot stanzas here and there, add them to a folder on my laptop. That bit of “Wild Geese” that goes, “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves,” except that I always misremembered it, until I looked it up, as ending with “want what it wants.”

Harry would flop down on my bed, on her stomach, and click through my selections. “This is nice. You should get this,” she said. I never ended up getting any tattoo. I had a particular anxiety about them, that anything permanent would embarrass me eventually. But I heard Harry repeat those lines later, and mistake the author. The soft animal. It’s possible that Harry named her hamster Emily Dickinson because she didn’t know who Mary Oliver was. I didn’t correct her, in the moment or later. For Harry to be innocently wrong about something was sweet.

I wandered. In the science section, I read about why the bees were disappearing. And they were disappearing, not just dying. Colony collapse disorder is when the bees abandon their hive in the middle of the night, leaving their queen behind and their larvae pupating in sealed waxy cells. Against my leg, Emily Dickinson had finally, blessedly, calmed in her little denim bag. I was also pretty sure she’d pissed in it.

When I eventually went looking for Harry, I found her picking through a wall of cookbooks. She couldn’t even reach the second-highest shelf standing on tiptoe. “Which one do you want?” She pointed, and I handed her a beginner’s guide to French cooking.