We hadn’t really talked about “us,” or what it would be like back in the city, or anything else. There was no “us.” Of course, I had thought about it, had wanted to ask: “What is this? What are we going to do with it when we get back?”

But I never asked in the glare of daylight—I wouldn’t have dared. Maybe I’m confused, the moments merging into one another, disfiguring one another like too many voices speaking at once. But now that I think of it, I remember I only dared ask on the last night, as we lay in the dark of the tent, about to fall asleep after having made love. I asked the question into the dark, afraid. You didn’t say anything for an interminable moment, and I thought you had fallen asleep. Finally, you whispered, “I don’t want this to end.”

My heart beating hard, knocking against the wall of my chest, I replied: “Me neither.”

When we arrived in the city, light came from every corner, bounced off every facade as hotly and radiantly as I felt flooded with happiness and anxiety. I was no longer in control. I’d think back to the lake, the tent—compulsively, like the birth of something I could not yet imagine. I had found my place on your sandstone body—between your thighs and the mounds of your nipples, in the cave of your armpits. The geography of you was suddenly as clear as that of the city, skin warmed like the bricks of the tenement houses, the lines of your body like the straight and unbroken lines of the avenues, of the tram tracks and the stiff metal barriers that threw crisscrossed shadows onto the streets. The same barriers that appeared stable but could move under your weight, creaking when you leaned on them for too long, threatening to release you onto the busy car-ridden tar.