On an autumn afternoon we sat in the back seat of a small car. There were too many people in the back seat. Our legs touched. Hello, he said. My left side burned. I can feel the pressure of his body, all our clothes between us. I’ve been trying to write about this for thirty years.

I want to dig up everyone who was in that car and drag them all home, holding on to their melting faces, screaming into them, Was any of this real? Did any of it happen?

We wrote notes to each other and left them on each other’s drawing boards in the art studio. Fifteen years ago I threw them away. They were getting in the way of what I wanted to remember, which was the distance between us. I didn’t realize at the time that I controlled it totally, that I’d invented it to maintain my ecstatic debasement.