We packed up our books and went to her place to make a pea soup with mint and discuss if white people could ever partake in indigenous practices without it being fucked up. We agreed that at minimum, white people would have to attribute these indigenous practices to their specific peoples, not try to profit off these experiences, and send resources toward the indigenous groups. Stone added that we should try to connect to the heritage of our ancestors, learn about those mystical experiences as well. I pictured my Russian Jewish relatives, whirling around with red kabbalah bracelets on their wrists.

I had slipped back inside the pool of life, not by working out or getting a good job or becoming sponsored on the Gram, but by living in infinite and everyday time with Stone.

Don’t h8 on my happiness and call me a queer Nicholas Sparks, thanks, I wanted to tell the inevitable chorus of salty queers who detested love.

Every time I returned to Blithe’s, I’d light a candle, pet Alice, open the guest nook window, and sit, entranced, as old stirrings came back to me, layers of resonance that I’d cut off when I transitioned, and before.

I collected them, in a basket, in my mind.

Blithe would come home from wandering the open-air markets and make an elaborate stew. Sometimes I would help him, and he’d order me around. It was good for our friendship when I was his kitchen bottom. I could never chop the glass onions finely enough. After I cleaned up, we’d smoke a joint on his couch and the tautness of the world would relax.

“I want to be on another planet,” he confided one night during our postdinner recline.

I replied, “It’s normal to be in Extra-Terrestrial mode. Just know that there are beautiful planets away from Earth, like Venus, and Pluto, if it is still one.”

He glared through the pot haze.

“I’m not trying to be annoying,” I said. “I’m just saying that I’m here for you and that you won’t be in this state forever. Even if that’s a stock saying, it’s true.”

He tightened his hoodie until it covered his face (it looked like a butthole, I might add) and did not speak to me for the rest of the night.

In my sleep, I dreamed of my parents and I dreamed in color.

When I woke up, they stayed with me.

I wanted to call Sophie and scream, You never told me that everything lost could return!

Hadn’t she?