On our trip up through the mountains Bay had told me that I could stay at the farm for three days or the rest of my life. His family—intentional family, not born family—sustained itself communally, off the grid, in the old way. This was the real world, he explained, and if I stayed I’d get a real-world name to replace my fake-world one. He said I would come to understand that there was no definite self: in the Ash Family there was no selfishness, so there were no possessions, no children, no couples.

“What if I stay longer than three days but want to leave after?” I said.

“Why would you want to leave, when you’ll have more freedom here than anywhere else?” he said. The family’s father, Bay said, was Dice, and Dice would understand me the way a lightning bolt would understand a rod.

I was ready to believe it, all of it. Bay could see, as no one else had, the yearning I felt for a more essential life. To me essential meant a life more connected to wild nature. I’d always known there was magic on the margins, there was a world beyond my mother’s world, where a dinner that “went off without a hitch” meant a dinner where no one talked about anything that mattered. My mother cared about manners and appearances and above all she wanted me to go to college so that I would “have a better future.” She wanted a life of safety for me, as though safety were still possible on the choked earth. Safety was a relic from before humans destroyed the world.

Some part of my mother was riven; I kept stumbling along the edges. Once my ex-boyfriend and I had found a broken-down shotgun in her dresser drawer.

My ex-boyfriend, Isaac, told me that my desire for a more essential life was meaningless unless I was fleeing from and fleeing toward. I’d had so much trouble discerning the toward. I was looking for the toward. Then I met Bay. Next to him, in the yellow-winged morning, it seemed to me that everyone in Durham had told me just what I’d needed to leave them behind.

The hickory leaves pattered against our backs and adhered to the house’s clapboards. “Will I meet Dice now?” I said.

“Not for a little while, I think,” said Bay. “Let the fake world fall away.”

His arm was around me, and I watched his breath enter the air. The cold had broken records for September. I didn’t know where I would sleep, what I would eat. I had no money and no possessions. Three days or the rest of my life, I thought. We stood listening to the leaves, the sheep’s plaintive calls, the cows’ exasperated moos. A white dog loped toward me—it was huge, almost my height—and butted its head into my chest.