Something, somewhere, pulls me from the dark and explodes inside me, a rush of vivid scenes that fly at me like memories with wings, shimmering and breathing, moments from my life, most keenly felt, an infinite gallery of my own experiences coming at random, one on top of another, side by side, singular, then merging into one, a sweeping view of my entire existence, but every detail and color exact, all light and movement just as it had been. I relive every emotion precisely as it had felt, every wound and disappointment, but enchantment too; and not only my own feelings—I can go inside someone else and know what they’d seen and felt, know all the sadness and joy they carried from their own lives. Not only people, but animals and things—the whole universe alive to sensation and feeling—now alive to me! There is no progression, not even time at all, a second and a thousand years, both and neither. Everything at once and separate, present, and then gone, but indelible. Everything I have told you, little bird. All this reached for me and gathered me in its arms. Carried me across the gateway, and back to life.

I lifted my head to see the boatman looking at me, as I looked at him, a boundless sympathy between us. My mouth hung open, my jaw quivered, but no words came out. What words could there be? I wanted to grab his sleeves with both hands: Did you see what I’ve seen? That my heartbeat, like yours, is the heart of the world inside us? That everything touches every other thing, and love, even the darkest corners where no light lives? That we float, all of us, in the same water, on the threshold of eternity? And you and I, alive in it now. Right now.

Of course, with his kind gray eyes, he saw only a woman who’d jumped into the Thames off Putney Bridge, and escaped with her life.

When we reached the river stairs, he climbed from the boat and held out his hand to steady me. I offered him back his blanket, but he refused it.

“Almost forgot,” he said, pressing something into my palm. “When I pulled you up, you was holdin’ on to it for dear life.”

I looked down to see the carnelian ring, its perfect circle, returned.

When I opened my mouth to say something, he shook his head, no need. But I knew, looking in that good boatman’s face, that he was right. I would not jump off Putney Bridge again, or any bridge, not drink laudanum, not cut my wrists, but live to claim what joy was mine—the fierce, unruly, grim, defiant, soaring joy of being human.

And now, little bird, you too will do the same.