While my younger sister poses in front of Rothkos on her brief recess from a jostling lurch through the white-walled American wing / , whose plaques admit no mistake, / I read a different room. I read, beside “Seascape with Three Boats” / , each ship a beige word curled over stunning blue, / that the calligram, an abstraction of Islamic calligraphic scripts, “occurred well before the advent of twentieth century Western modernism...and continues to this today.”

I wrote this lyric essay years ago, but I feel its themes—indeterminacy, loneliness, distant forms of intimacy—are especially poignant now. So I want to share it with you, this love letter to friends, and to longing, and, too, to the possibility that sits within uncertainty.

My bones are not softer than average, and their pain when broken is sharp, hard. But years of injuries have taught me that bodies are soft—softer when wounded—all the way down to the bone.