But still. I’ve done it. I’m on the other side of the world going somewhere. I’m not stuck on the sofa at home, staring into space. I’m here on this train staring out of the window. Always moving, always learning, living a life, as instructed. The only way.

This train bumps and thrums like a heartbeat, soothing, actually, pulling me down to sleep. I think about other numbers. How many stops between Mumbai and Madgaon. How many miles an hour this thing will go while I am sleeping. How many minutes it will wait at each station and how many people will get on and off. The number of days I knew Novo for, and all the useless days before I knew him, and all the endless days since. The number of nights we spent awake and talking, just talking, as if no one had ever quite heard our voices before. The weight of all he did and didn’t tell me. The sheer volume of our laughter. How many people he will see in his own lifetime, compared to mine. How long it will be, if ever, before I forget about him and about how this feels, before I’m whittled down and worn out by experience and disappointments and other loves (not like this one, nothing like this one) and can throw in the towel and say, “I knew a boy once.”

I put my face up against the window, keep the light out with my hands, and try to see what we are moving through, what kind of place—a suburb, a slum, a farm, a forest, a river. It’s too dark out there, black-dark, but this is not all I’ve come down to— looking and looking and the whole time not seeing a thing. My eyes are open. I drink this stuff in. Something tells me the world is full of magic and I will learn how to love everything in it, except for Novo, because that is the only way to love him, in the end.

My name is Jude, I tell myself, and I let him go, that magic boy, and we are both free.

The lack of him feels as real and as solid as his body beside me once did.

Hello Now, I tell him, wherever you are.

TWENTY-EIGHT