Time has this unfortunate habit of acting like a diffi cult child if you don’t watch it carefully. It’s been bad lately, running away when the babysitter’s back was turned. Four years gone, and where did they go? The last snows on these roads that are veins etched into my consciousness, and where did it all go? We had so much time. Whole, fat years of it.

Nicole and I, laying on the grass beside Glass Lake, American sun fresh in my eyes. ‘Don’t ask me how I am, Ziggy. It’s the most cruel of all pleasantries. When you ask someone how they are, you’re just tempting the askee with a question social dictates don’t allow them to answer. So don’t ask me how I am, and stop trying to sell Tara your damn pot, okay?’

Asher growing out of his gangly closet. Asher drunk and trailing glitter down Main Street. Asher broken for a moment, on the floor, in the dark, asking me if it would always be like this.

Author—Implied Author—Narrator— NARRATIVE— Narratee—Ideal Reader—Reader

And when the parts are laid bare, all the stories start to make sense.

David calling me free like a sad prophet—wrong, after all. In the days before I must leave, I removed myself from my life. I stopped taking calls from friends, stopped going to One for karaoke and drinks. I sat hopelessly in classes all day and rode the campus buses in endless loops at night.

It’s too much to let the end be the end. An end bears easier if it has already happened and you’re left looking back—not living the breathless devastation inherent in a true moment of goodbye. So while it wasn’t yet over, I looked back on what could not be, again, with doomed, dashed longing.

On the depth and texture of this life. The irretrievability of this time. On Asher, on Nicole, on drunk Jane, beautiful Jane, kissed-me-back-because-she-was-drunk Jane, sad Jane, we-jumped-in-the-lake Jane. We thawed off in the shower, we pulled in David: ménage a faux.

‘In Soviet Sandvitch Shop, you don’t make sandvitch, sandvitch is made for you.’

What?

‘What?’

‘In Soviet Sandvitch Shop, you don’t make—’

‘No, I heard you. I just don’t—What?’

He laughed. ‘It’s three in the morning and I’m in here alone. I have to entertain myself somehow, right?’

Relieved, but also pissed at myself for not being cool enough to catch on and play along, I quirked a half-smile, then felt like a bitch and laughed too hard.

‘Right. Can I get the number four?’

‘Sure. You have really pretty eyes, by the way.’

‘Um, thanks. I’d like that toasted, please.’