It hasn’t even been three months since I got back, but this semester, not yet over, has proceeded like a series of rapid system shocks. After a gruelling and unsuccesful set of job interviews at the summer’s close, I flew back to school and to news that my father’s cancer may have returned. He thought he was dying, my once-indomitable once-towering now-melancholic now-hypochondriac father, with the rest of his children around his bed. In fact, it was that internal stitches from a previous surgery had come loose, an unspooling of thread inside him. Meanwhile, I was doing too many things at once, a frenzy of too many simultaneous deadlines, a struggling to remember all these things were doable and negotiable. And then I watched one of the most beautiful relationships of my life wane to a tired, unhappy end.

It can leave you a little breathtless, how life happens to you, just as it does to everyone else. We watch our parents grow old, we watch our lovers shift shapes. We wait for things to die, bide our time until goodbyes.

Today, it’s late when I get on the bus home. It’s dark and it’s stormy, and I think suddenly of the stories we have amassed between us, of the phenomenally rejuvenating force of narrative. I think of how in one of the first conversations we had, away at the beginning of this year, you said that your impending departure would not limit your care for me. And I, past master of long-distance not-quite relationships, stiffened. Then I curled into your arm, thinking I had nothing to lose, thinking maybe this is what courage looks like. Coming home today, I think of how wondrous it is that when so many months later, my mother told me that my father was in too much pain to speak to me, I had your body to convulse my sobs against.

Those stories would have been impoverished by your absence. When it’s not so late, I will have the proper words to explain what about that catches my breath in something that resembles this time, not grief, but gratitude.