When I unpacked my books, I found an old chapbook of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Pictures of the Gone World I had gotten for a dollar at a bookstore in Chicago. I opened it to the first poem and remembered reading it years earlier. “Away above a harborful of caulkless houses / among the charley noble chimney-pots of a rooftop rigged with clotheslines / a woman pastes up sails upon the wind.”

That was a woman, perpetually appearing from behind something, too busy being a part of the world to consider it from the outside. She was the soft pink inside of the world.

Back when I got it, I had just noticed the beauty of the poem’s imagery. Looking at it now, it had an added weight. I wanted to be outside the world, like a poet, and I wanted to be inside the world, like a woman.

I thought about putting my books on the curb, next to the blinds, for old women and students to sift through on their walks. Instead, I put them in the empty spaces on Lauren’s bookshelf. Most of my books were thin little poetry collections, unobtrusive next to Lauren’s thick, cracked-spine novels.

I went in, closed the window, and cautiously went down the stairs to the living room. In the silent, gray morning, I noticed details. There were two panes of stained glass in the little windows, so even when it was overcast, the light made the inside look warm. The faint rectangles of pink and green light lay above the front door, on the kitchen cabinets, on the tile backsplash below them. I read the envelopes of junk mail on the kitchen table. There was a novel by Heinrich Böll (The Bread of Those Early Years) face down on the love seat by the window, next to an abandoned tarot spread. The Emperor, the Hermit, the Five of Wands. A big stack of faded board games on the floor next to the bookshelf, the dull-colored ceramic bowls Lauren’s recovery sponsor made that were full of stones from the beach in California. One on the coffee table, one in the kitchen next to the stand mixer.

Lauren woke up early, around six-thirty, when I had already been up for a while, writing in my diary at the kitchen table. She turned on all the lights, put on an apron over her ruffled linen shirt and jean shorts. She was already wearing her work clothes.

After she got some stuff sizzling in a pan, she rifled through the CDs stacked next to the player in the kitchen and picked one. A slithery clarinet struck up a familiar, easygoing dance with a string quartet.