I remember once, at the top of Tanglewood Lane in Myers Park, Blake had just picked me up from a babysitting job. We were putting our seatbelts on, getting ready to drive to Freedom Park, when there was a knock against the glass. An old woman with huge rheumy eyes and a straggly grey bob leaned in to peer at us. I lowered the glass.

‘Hello?’

‘Are you running out of people?’ she said. She was looking at us in a hard, mean way. Not like a confused little old lady. ‘Have you never lost anyone, then? You never missed someone by mistake?’

We just blinked at her.

‘Well?’ the old lady asked. ‘Have you?’

‘Are you missing someone, ma’am?’ Blake finally asked.

And suddenly, her face softened. ‘Yes. My husband. He’s going to be angry at me, that’s for sure.’

I wanted to ask the lady, who are you? Are you lost? Should we call someone? But I just stared at her, dumb, speechless. Finally we left her there, saying, ‘Okay now, you have a good day,’ and she looked at us, angry again, disgusted. ‘Yes, I’ll try.’

After freshman year I moved out of the dorm to share an apartment with an Ethiopian girl, Misrak, who, when she grew homesick, sat in bed and gnawed on doughy rings of injera. We were reading Brave New World together and listening to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. We were studying Business Administration but we didn’t really know what we wanted to be. We talked about moving to San Francisco after graduation to wait tables and write poems. Every Wednesday we hit the nightclubs with our fake IDs. We’d stand on wooden boxes in cheap black dresses and shake and move, thinking, Yes sir, here we are in America.

There were things I hadn’t been prepared for in America, like counting dimes to buy rancid bean burritos from Taco Bell, the melancholy of a Wal-Mart store at 2 a.m., reverse-wearing underwear. All the sprawl and waste and marvel of American life.

And when I say American life, I mean the lives of the rich bankers in the neighbourhood around the college where Misrak and I folded laundry and pulled boogers out of their kids’ noses for five bucks an hour.

Street after street of mansion and lawn, each competing in bigness, each with its own overfed Labrador unencumbered by a single blood-sucking tick, stunned into dumb submission by an invisible electric fence.

And this abundance of gleaming created something sick in me – not a yearning for home exactly, but the imprint of a lost, forgotten thing, and I knew if I wanted to catch that lost thing I would have to leave America.

In hindsight, I could say it was Lucia. That I had always been carrying around this sense of loss in me. But in those days I went searching for other things – in the face of the old man fumbling around for treasures among the bric-a-brac of the Dollar Store, or the immigrant woman trawling through the aisles of Food Lion, fondling all the fruits and vegetables in search of the fattest and the sweetest. I’d think of that poor, helpless woman in Myers Park looking for all the missing people in her life, and it seemed to me that in every corner of America there was someone growing sick with loneliness. And all that started up a mad swirling inside me of what I can only describe as grief. I don’t know whether it had anything to do with being poor, or lonely, or America itself, but it had nothing to do with missing my parents.