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Content Warning: This piece deals with issues of death and grief.

When the music stops, they’re leaning backwards close to the ground, holding a final pose just above the ice and smiling. After a beat, the applause begins—there is an uproar from the crowd. The two dancers stand still—looking at one another for a few moments, shocked and ecstatic. It is 2010, and Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir have just secured gold at the Vancouver Winter Olympics.

I ground my heel into the patch of lichen clinging to a wayside boulder, about a hundred yards from where my mother stood. She was pointing up to where I could not see. My boot paled under the swinging shadow of overhanging ivy—it was the same green as my home, which sat on the border between town and township, middle and middler class. From this angle, farther up the curved slope of the trail, my mother seemed to have buried her whole hand in the roots of a nearby tree that clung, high above her, to the mountainside.

The man waiting to place his order at the register taps his fingers on the counter to the beat of Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” which is playing over the ambient din of the restaurant. He is tan and wearing a circle scarf—dad-age, but the kind of dad who knows the difference between Kobe and Wagyu beef and who has been on the receiving end of a manicure. He looks a bit like what I imagine Barbie’s boyfriend would look like at 50.

I’m standing in my too-warm room with a yellow Ticonderoga pencil between my teeth. It’s the summer before college, but the woody taste reminds me of being in elementary school––maybe because I haven’t used pencils to do my homework since then, or felt particularly inclined to chew on them. But I’m doing this right now because an eHow article told me that speaking with a pencil in my mouth would help me learn how to roll my R’s.

In a strip mall off Virginia Beach Boulevard in Virginia Beach, Virginia, nestled between a smoke shop and a laundromat, you can find J Mart Japanese Grocery. The entire store is only about the size of an average suburban kitchen. At the front of the store are two standard refrigerators, with the ’90s-style grainy white doors and a top-loading freezer with a glass cover. Shelves stocked with dry goods, like soy sauce and rice vinegar, line the back walls. To the left, behind the single cashier, is a display of beckoning lucky cats, sake sets, magazines, and English-subtitled anime DVDs.

For days, we sat around the TV. We heard—for the first time, and then over and over again—about the night of November 26, 2008, when 10 attackers, well-armed and well-trained, entered Bombay on a small boat. They stayed for four days.

A squirrel’s body is roughly as heavy as a pair of shoes. I know this because there is a squirrel in a shoebox between my legs, and when I carried him in this shoebox to the car I am currently riding through northwest Washington, D.C., it felt almost as though I was carrying a pair of new shoes.

On Wednesday, September 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico. I didn’t know the hurricane was coming until two days before when my half-brother called from the hospital my father was staying at to tell me it was coming. I wasn’t concerned. As far as I remembered, there had always been hurricane warnings in Puerto Rico but none of them had ever hit. It had only been a week since Irma and at the time they had predicted doomsday—the power would be out and when it went out, it’d be out for months, they said. No data, no wifi, zero communication with anyone outside of the island. Puerto Rico would be devastated.

There are few spaces more transient, in between, and decidedly nowhere than airport terminals. I am sitting at my gate at Chicago O’Hare at the end of Thanksgiving break, waiting to board my flight back to New York, shifting back into a New York frame of mind. There are significant differences between the version of me that woke up in Illinois at 4:40 a.m. today and the version of me that will land at LaGuardia. Already, I am quieter, more cautious. My ears, which just a few days ago could pick out the dull Christmas music in every department store, begin to tune out the cacophony. My body makes its way to New York City. My mind curls inward.