Just after my father’s, then Gideon’s, then Marco’s funerals, I went a bit awry and fell over into a swerving sort of sewering grief. Looking back, I think my dad’s death cost me far more than I knew then. I was so fixed on the injustice of my young friends going down to it. I almost took Natural Causes for granted.

You can only postpone the self-pity for so long. And when it jumps you all at once, it hits you like the beast in the jungle. Jugular, it goes for.

With them dead, I found that basically I did not care to caretake myself. You cannot simply reach down now, tickle yourself and expect to laugh. Takes two, though three are even better. You can only bear to lose so many in a row. You keep turning for help to your next-to-last one down, keep expecting he might help you with this loss most recent. Missingness cannot support you. Soon, that steady whistle is the wind tunnel you live in. Soon—you can barely sit up on your futon—(and why do futons suddenly seem so passé? Why live in a city where everybody sleeps on the same sort of furniture in the self-same trendy season?).

Then I truly could not get up off my outmoded mattress. I lost those marginal unwanted fifteen pounds and then dropped thirty-five and people began avoiding me. But it was not That. At least, not That, directly.

Only Angie hung right in there, with awful jokes and flowers almost too perfect. “Just no white lilies, ever,” I begged her. She laughed her best bad witch imitation.

She was the only one who kept on teasing me alive. “You have work to do. Potential, remember? That’s where we all came in.”

In the literature of sailing there’s the term “becalmed.” To us, these days so driven by speed’s imperatives, it can sound desirable. It was actually a sailor’s nightmare—to be left floating on a sailing ship far far from even sight or thought of land, with only windpower to push you, and then no breeze for weeks. I felt like that. All dressed up and no place to blow, anchored yet only in some void. My sails aloft, waiting for the only locomotion something so passive could count on … a push, a jump.

In those months before I fled New York, I still passed Ossorio’s. But crossed to the street’s other side, fear of who would not be visible there at “our” table, one reclaimed for the general good, dominoes now played there by the dapper older Cuban gents.

Then, if I can chronicle another change, and I am trying trying—several things lifted, a breeze had pushed me somewhat forward. As happens at the breakup of a depression so complete, I was moving before I quite noticed.