I crawled out of angry dreams and found myself in the same bed where the long sandy hair had once fallen and the pale blue, winter-sky eyes had once flickered, their gaze moving through me like a tide, eroding my insides, drawing me out into the ocean grain by grain. There was no sandy hair, no wintry eyes this go-round. There was only my own dark matted curls framing my own tired, throbbing orbs of blood and nerve and color. I stepped out onto the porch, into the white fog that musters its strength here after rainy nights, in the trough of two looming hills where the duplex stands like a crumbling house of cards—the same porch where the blonde strands whipped while turning away and the backpack bulged and the hiking boots gripped the asphalt at the beginning of a long, muddy hike into nowhere.

I shook the mesh-iron chair . . .