She’d spent the whole morning feeling like a stalker as she searched the internet for signs of Kierk. There’d been no social media presence, no personal website, no pictures of him, none of the usual information about places he’s lived and weight fluctuations and fashion changes, and for some reason this lack of information intrigued her greatly, and she knew she was acting strange—she had actually smashed a glass while rinsing it in the sink from scrubbing too enthusiastically, like there was this building kinetic force inside her.

It’s been a long time since she felt anything like this, and it’s never hit this quickly before. Relationships, Carmen thinks, are only sensible when they’re over. During, the fog of war reigns. In the plastic seats of the swaying metro, Carmen handles the last time she had been in love in her mind. The memory is not narrative in structure, but geometric. It exists outside of time, a faceted gemstone of movements and greetings and sex and food and holidays and plane flights and phone calls and parties and moments of early-dark animal warmth. Carmen turns it over in her mind, seeing the beginning, the ending, all of it at once. She would think that time is an illusion, but she knows that’s a poor metaphor. Rather, Carmen feels that time is a solid; that the way God would see a life is as a solid geometric shape of a billion dimensions, a diamond shaved and smoothed by the tides of eternal return.