100 Proof

In the morning, she saw how many bruises he had left behind.

Just noting souvenirs, she said, pointing at one, then the other.

I’m sorry, he said. But I couldn’t have helped it if I’d wanted to.

No apologies needed, she said. No apologies needed at all.

She wound her way, turn by turn, through the streets of his neighborhood. She still remembered the code to his apartment building, though she hadn’t been there in years. It was rainy that night, the whole world slippery under her tires.

Turn by turn, she told herself stories of the life they’d hoped to lead. Turn by turn, she covered familiar ground.

She didn’t have a destination. She was only passing through.

They sang in words she did not understand, but she clapped her hands anyway, caught up in zealous rhythms and charged melodies. This was what she had flown so far to find: this music played on a night so humid it curled her hair and left her entire body damp. She had returned to life, finally, after everything that came before. Drums, horns, voices lifted her above all the rest of it, above everything she had run from.

Are you crying because you’re sad, or because you’re afraid? she asked.

I’m not crying, he said. I’m just trying to figure out the difference between what you think you see and what you know.

That makes about as much sense as anything, she said. It was only later, when she had left him at the doorstep, that she realized he’d been lying the whole time.

“But what if I only 10 percent wish it would all be different?” I asked. “Can I get back in touch with him then?”

“No,” she said. “You have to wait until it’s zero percent. Otherwise, you’re just going to get hurt again.”

This is the sort of advice I would give others, but it’s the sort of advice I don’t, for a second, want to take.

She wanted nothing more than to step outside her skin, to slip from herself like a serpent, like a caterpillar. The world inside was so dark, and out there, so light.

Do you feel it? he asked, putting a hand to the center of her chest.

Yes, she said. But I so wish it would stop.

Smoke rose from the building next door, but it wasn’t the kind of smoke that causes panic. She felt solid as the wind shifted and blew it around her, wrapping her in the smell of char and carbon and meat. She felt not for a second hungry—not for the source of the smoke, not for the source of her own internal fire, and not for anything more than what lay before her: a small quantity of light, time in which to absorb it, and the steady sound of her own heart beating.