Erin and I both grew up in narrow brick houses near the highway in Detroit that smelled like cat piss and cigarette smoke. She had spent her childhood summers going up north, and the first time I went over to her house in high school she showed me pictures of her shooting guns. No one at school thought she was a lesbian, the way they were somehow able to sniff that on me. They just thought she was snobbish, which she was. But I could see something else there, or wanted to, and maybe that was why we became friends. We kissed for the first time a week after graduation, and then a week later we had sex in the backseat of her parents’ car in the parking lot of our high school.

In college, my infatuation for her became a scab I kept ripping off. I rationalized it to myself when she’d only sleep with me when she was sad and feeling vulnerable. I told myself that she wasn’t being cruel when she told me about boyfriends, about going home for Christmas, when she’d still try to get in bed with me after getting drunk. She meted out attention casually, sporadically, and just as suddenly would ignore me.

I spent my time laying around in my room, thinking about nearly nothing. Or, I’d walk around. I was still figuring out what to do here. I needed a job, and I needed a project. Erin had a project. She was in school to prove it. I thought about going over to Erin’s house, to see if she was back from class yet. She’d probably be sitting at the piano next to the big windows in front of her huge yard. When she wasn’t in front of a piano she was irritated, distracted. In her last year of undergrad, when she had gotten her own practice room, she’d make me sit outside if I was early to meet her. The narrow hallways in the basement of the music school were full of people playing their instruments beautifully, acrobatically, repetitively. From Erin’s room, I would hear explosions of upright piano punctuated by long silences. “You can leave if you want,” she’d say, in the doorway, not letting me in. “I’m in the middle of something here.”

Erin had a project, and that meant her time was really just the time between now and her death, measured into days that she drank down like tall glasses of clear, cold water. I shouldn’t be greedy. I’ll see her later. Don’t you have anything to do? The familiar self-reproach, like an echo of all the times before when I had hoped.

Hope was over now. I needed something firmer than that. I wasn’t sure where I was supposed to look for it. In myself, to start with.