and so I continued to sit there hour after hour watching the unrelenting rain slosh against the glass, thinking of our life together, Lotte’s and mine, how everything in it was designed to give a sense of permanence, the chair against the wall that was there when we went to sleep and there again when we awoke, the little habits that quoted from the day before and predicted the day to come, though in truth it was all just an illusion, just as solid matter is an illusion, just as our bodies are an illusion, pretending to be one thing when really they are millions upon millions of atoms coming and going, some arriving while others are leaving us forever, as if each of us were only a great train station, only not even that since at least in a train station the stones and the tracks and the glass roof stay still everything else rushes through it, no, it was worse than that, more like a giant empty field where every day a circus erected and dismantled itself, the whole thing from top to bottom, but never the same circus, so what hope did we really have of ever making sense of ourselves, let alone one another?

I knew that to find and to feel Yoav again would be terribly painful, because of what had become of him, and because of what I knew he could ignite in me, a vitality that was excruciating because like a flare it lit up the emptiness inside me and exposed what I secretly knew about myself: how much time I’d spent being only partly alive, and how easily I’d accepted a lesser life. I had a job like anyone, even if I disliked it, I even had a boyfriend, a gentle, kind person who loved me and evoked in me a kind of tender ambivalence. And yet the moment I finished the letter, I knew that I would go to Yoav. In light of him, everything — the inky shadows, the dirty dishes, the tarred roofs outside the window — took on a different look, became more acute, altered by a rush of feeling. He awakened a hunger in me — not just for him, but also for the magnitude of life, for the extremes of all it has been given to us to feel. A hunger and also courage. Later, looking back at how easily I’d closed the door on one life and slipped away to another, to him, it seemed that all those years I’d just been waiting for that letter, and that everything I’d built up around me had been made of cardboard, so that when it finally arrived I could fold it up and throw it away.

Maybe the first time you saw her you were ten. She was standing in the sun scratching her legs. Or tracing letters in the dirt with a stick. Her hair was being pulled. Or she was pulling someone’s hair. And a part of you was drawn to her, and a part of you resisted—wanting to ride off on your bicycle, kick a stone, remain uncomplicated. In the same breath you felt the strength of a man, and a self-pity that made you feel small and hurt. Part of you thought: Please don’t look at me. If you don’t, I can still turn away. And part of you thought: Look at me.

Herman slipped his hand into mine, and I thought, An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone’s hand, and the next thing that happened was we kissed each other, and I found I knew how, and I felt happy and sad in equal parts, because I knew that I was falling in love, but it wasn’t with him.

Wittgenstein once wrote that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. I wish I could draw you.