You once told me that the human eye is god’s loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn’t even know there’s another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty. Opening the front door to the first snowfall of my life, you whispered, “Look.”

Perhaps to lay hands on your child is to prepare him for war.

Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.