I exhausted myself after four thousand words. I’ve never written anywhere close to that amount in one sitting. For the past hour, I’ve sat here, staring at nothing, still marginally drunk, wondering how I will get through this day.

I reach over and lift my phone from the mahogany side table, a piece of furniture that hasn’t moved from this spot as long as I’ve been alive.

The text message is from the Bury School District. All schools closed due to weather. I’m completely disoriented, trying to remember any weather at all. There was snow a few nights ago, though it wasn’t bad. The night at the trailhead with Cora. A dozen lifetimes ago.

I can’t wrap my mind around what day it is, never mind the weather. I look back to my phone.

Monday.

How is it Monday already?

A year ago, I was on top of everything. Had to know the news. The temperatures for the coming week. People’s social-media tidbits. I consumed everything, but now my brain is so overloaded I can’t even remember the last time I showered.

I stand, aching from hours hunched over a laptop. Blood drains from my head, threatening to topple me. I fight it, steady myself, and walk over to the window and pull back the heavy gold drapes.

Under the pink wash of dawn, an unexpected foot of snow suffocates the landscape. The sight of so much transcendent white causes me to stare for minutes on end, mesmerized. More than mesmerized. In absolute awe.

I’ve experienced this one other time: freshman year of high school, a ten-day trip to Italy with my school. We had three days in Rome, and my friends and I were much more concerned with Italian boys than Italian culture. One morning was dedicated to touring the Vatican, which promised to be boring in addition to hot and crowded. I had no reason to be interested in anything religious; the only time my father mentioned God was in using his last name, damn it. Within the sea of worshipping humanity that morning, our tour group finally inched inside St. Peter’s Basilica. Self-absorbed fourteen-year-old that I was, I was impressed at only a minimal level. Another big cathedral. So. What.

But then we scuffled over to one side of the vast room, which was so packed you could nearly taste the mix of sweat, perfume, and body odor. I couldn’t even see over the tourists in front of me and was approaching claustrophobia and at the brink of losing my mind when something happened. All of a sudden, there was no one in front of me, and I was staring into a glass wall with a sculpture behind it.

It was the first and only time I’ve seen Michelangelo’s La Pietà. It took a moment to realize what it was, but then it clicked. This was Mary holding the body of her son. I had seen a thousand images of Jesus on the trip, but this sculpture grabbed my heart and squeezed so hard I stopped breathing. At that age, I cared little for art and had no connection with Jesus, but in that moment, I was so transfixed by this sculpture—how could it be so smooth?—that I began to weep. Right there. Tears fell, and I thought I was having some kind of religious experience.