Should I go in, I ask, eyes searching the rippling green. A breeze arrives, skimming the sand with the answer we already know. By now, she says, you understand its language, do what the ocean tells you.

The icy slap, and then the hiss as it spreads, racing now across the clattering shells, the sun blazing its momentary path like liquid lightning to the sand and the surface glistening, listening for the sacred stasis of that moment when it slows, shining fierce and fearless— this is where the sea catches its breath, and I let mine…

Like an astronaut, earth strapped to my back, launched at the teeming abyss, I stepped forward, floating, for a moment, between the slope and the trees, flying eye-level with the summer pines, toward the wall of fireflies — pulsing stars, like the shimmering sparks of a hidden forest fire.

I still feel young, which, I suppose, is a ridiculous thing to say for a thirty-something. As if the point is to be still anything, to hold onto as much as we can. Versus, I suppose, settling in, stretching these seasoned muscles, being just still, and enjoying it.

Could it be, when God is silent, that whatever else he is doing, this is when he has turned, quieted his hands, sat down beside you, listening?

It’s that our breath held for that verdict, that we were relieved, and surprised, that millions had to shout to be heard, that suspicion was sufficient for execution, that nine minutes can’t be rewound, that liberty and justice is for some, that many more can’t breathe. Written in response to…

That ugly prayer billowed upward, like the acrid offering of a stew left too long on the stove. But it was his first without a recipe, the first he made, with whatever was in the fridge, from his heart.

Curling up inside a loaf of bread, fresh from the oven — that’s what love is, he told me. Or at least, I imagine, what he wanted it to be. He had been the fat kid, he said, stabbed with words as sharp as the pencils he gripped to scratch the pain into his sketchbooks. I always hoped he emerged from its warmth after a long while, and discovered that love is more than something you can hide in, that it’s something you can chew, something that can go down, still warm, into your belly, and make you strong. That it’s something you can learn to bake with flour and sweat, and pass across the table.

I don’t need to know anymore that fork is long behind us overgrown with memory and providence tangled footprints washed in rivulets of spring rain If we stumbled across the spot again we might catch our breath twist a walking stick from a fallen tree tug an apple from a gnarled branch, now ripe for picking We walk on scribble our map step in ever closer rhythm sometimes limping, but on opposite sides our feet now scarred and calloused, but stronger