Reading a biography of Susan Sontag that winter, I put three exclamation points in the margin next to a quote from her diaries: “I’m only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.” It summoned the pattern Kyle had described. But what did this pattern mean? Why did I keep pursuing these thresholds, even as I told myself I wanted something else? Maybe every rupture offered the chance to emerge as someone else, slightly altered, on the other side of each crisis.

Or maybe I wasn’t seeking what lay beyond each threshold but the experience of threshold-crossing itself. Maybe it was easier to keep living with the fantasy of stability glowing on the horizon, perpetually elusive, than it was to dwell inside the experience of stability itself—its vexations and claustrophobia, its permanence.