He told her about a time when they were walking together on a rainy night in May. Every light they saw felt like a chance for him to say how he felt. But the conversation kept wandering to a book Liana had read about a bunch of rich English and American people who were vacationing in Italy and treating limoncello like a potential wellness cure. And as she spoke about this, her thoughts were wending toward how throughout history liquor had probably always been treated that way, and he was thinking about her hands, how sometimes the first thought when he woke up was, What is she thinking? Ayanna couldn’t help but be moved a little. She could not tell if this feeling was simply because of how passionately this man was speaking or because maybe he was right. No one had kissed her in years. She had told Olivia that in her first year of college, she was going to get a 4.0 and get railed in the arboretum. Instead, Ayanna had struggled to get a 2.7 and only got asked out by the weird, mean kid in her freshman comp class whose idea of feedback was to tell everyone to write better.

Once, she’d been a woman named Liana who talked about novels while walking home with men in the rain rather than whisper words of deep and vast erotic anticipation. Outside Liana’s apartment, this man had said, “Do you think you could ever be in love with me?” And she had shaken his hand and went inside.

“Do you remember now?” he asked.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t think so,” Ayanna said.

He slapped the pen-and-pencil cup off her desk, then left, walking right through the heavy wooden door.

The rest of the night was spent spinning between what felt like only half-heard requests from different spirits (a goodbye, a bank account number, something to do with stolen slingbacks), a long dream—Ayanna hoped—that involved being in a Wendy’s and trying to stack twenty chicken nuggets on top of one another in a great leaning tower before being allowed to eat them, and then a phone call with Jane where Ayanna agreed to play on her soccer team. “Why are we having this conversation at four in the morning?” Ayanna said twice, and Jane replied each time, “Hey, asshole, you called me.” Sometimes for brief moments, Ayanna was on the path again, walking toward a pair of silver mountains in the distance. They alternated between the light blue every distant thing on Earth seems to have and a liquid silver. One of the few things Ayanna remembered reading and enjoying from her first year of college was an essay most of her classmates hated about longing, loneliness, the color blue, and how, maybe, at least in her interpretation of it, life might be a series of figuring out what amount of distance you needed from ideas, from people, from yourself.