That among a pile of salvaged trash, he would come closest to all he ever wanted to be: a consciousness sitting under a lightbulb reading his days away, warm and alone, alone and yet, somehow, still somebody’s son.

What’s the use of returning to the story of a dead love? Not to find “what happened,” but why it matters. To find matter—that place where love and death kiss, that place of creation and destruction. To find the glimpses of art and heart in my own story, the small sediments that arrange and settle, then again rise and rearrange.