When I was coming back from the tip of Manhattan, balancing myself in the train, an older woman nudged me through my coat and gestured at the open seat next to her. I smiled into her eyes and sat next to her silently, briefly, likely for the last time.

I was going home to you, an utterance only months old, up near the East Village. Those brown bricked towers, your window-less living room, the bedroom we bared ourselves in. I could not believe in anything fully, but I saw that you could.

I wasn’t thinking this then, but I am thinking this now again, which is, how do I make myself stop wanting to end my life, symbolically, seriously? How do I become brave enough, true enough, faithful enough, to face adversity as a means to live and not as a means to dissipate the desire to disappear? Or better, how do I accept my weaknesses and live imperfectly and with goodness?

I spilled coffee on your carpet and chicken soup on the floor and somehow you did not say anything incriminating. At times I feel guilty that we have found each other, at times I want to do things that I know would you hurt you terribly, and myself too. What is it that I even want to say, apart from the fact that I love you, I love our world, and that I love myself with more reservations that I dare name?