I understand, as much as a coddled civilian can understand anything — my rocks are pebbles, kicked up the slightest slope — that it must feel the most compelling thing in the world to continue to choose violence, to your drug dealer, your friends, your mind, your own body. But sometimes we have to do things without knowing. With the body, at least for me, you have to take a leap, have faith that if you can hold on and make it one or two weeks without a constant hangover, you will know things you don’t know now. There is a feeling in the body that is just the feeling of physical well-being and it connects you to all humans and other animals and maybe even trees. The war will always be there, but you have a choice of what to give your attention to. The familiar story, the car crash, or the thing more radical and more frightening and wiser than strength: to grieve, to renounce the story and that paragraph you can’t get past, to make peace with your contingency and interchangeability so you can see the other side of it, to the connections that make it a joy, sometimes, to be alive.