Thank you for writing the Shkreli piece. It challenged me to think.

When you write — keep it up — the image that sticks in my brain like wallpaper glue is the picking of them up, up, and how easy it is. It is not heavy lifting. Picking me up is heavy lifting, yet they do it.

The picking up, up. I do not necessarily mean the car they get into that has stopped at a corner.

I mean the art they make that defines them. That is what art is supposed to do. Without it, I could not do this, I would collapse. Art scrapes me up off the wall itself up, up.

I mean their bodies that collapse near the toilet on the floor when they have the flu.

Hot sweating wet flesh in cowboy pajamas. I will pick him up and he’s a feather of a childhood attempting to reassert itself wherever it was such a kid left off, put on hold, driven away, kicked off the front porch, but he has it back and he wants pajamas and they have to have cowboys on them. It’s a cowboy world of picking up the picking up.

The Glazier Foundation insists we have conquered pediatric AIDS.

And we have made tremendous progress with infants.

But what about the child who is born uninfected, but gets infected in preadolescence serving his adult masters.

Who says babies are worth picking up but not him.

If he is not worth picking up, then why was he born in the first place.

Blake should weigh 120 lbs. He is less than half of that. HIV and the witch’s brew that comes with it stunts their growth.

Sex work stunts their emotional growth.

Sometimes, there is no picking up where the kid left off. They become walking ghosts, arise.

Even ghosts have a certain grace.

I can now clean up vomit and shit without blinking. It has to be worth something.

The kid who constructs an image of himself in the backseat of a car his trick is driving to who knows where picks up my wild anger and forces me to find something to do with it. That, too, is a picking up.

I put the last few art supplies into cubbies while they sleep. It is a picking up of where they’ve been that day.

They pick me up when they remind me that there will be a tomorrow, that I promised, I promised there would be one, I promised.

THEY are the ones who pick me up even with their thinness and intransigence.

What they are picking up is also time.

I have no fucking idea where it went.