When I was twenty, the future was filled with lines of doom and African freedom-fighters. Con-trails of exploded space shuttles that never shuttled anyone anywhere. We bounced off one another like molecules in a thermal reaction when the DJ played “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”

When I was twenty, I failed my classes and slept deep into my winter gloom. Woke with sleep in my eyes and crust in the corners of my mouth. Ordered hot toddys, which the bartender in Kenmore Square slid over the bar to me with the kind of sympathy that nearly-pretty girls who can crack a dark joke get.

When I was twenty, I carried Wolfe and Butler and de Beauvoir under my arm, and still flinched when a homeless man I smiled at on the street, hissed “Hello, pussy.”

I let the sad-eyed Brazilian cook from the cafeteria convince me to go to a disco in Revere, far from the usual Boston dance clubs, my limbs stiff when he lambada-d, and later, too, on the rough carpet of his bedroom floor, where we finally gave up and fell asleep.

The year I was twenty, I ignored all the warnings, went outside to lean into the wind of a dying hurricane. I lifted my arms, let gravity hold me, half-standing, half-falling, and realized the perspective at a slant was much the same.

That was the year words became ash on my tongue, thick white paste that limned my mouth. Shades stayed drawn, books uncracked. I stopped my Sunday call. I went for two weeks without a shower, three without washing my hair. Piled it under a knit cap that stank of scalp, and spent solitary hours walking without proper boots or coat along the icy Charles River, fantasizing about making a bracelet of blackened toes that would click and clack around my wrist and warn the world I was coming.

When I was twenty, my worried roommate tapped an S.O.S. onto the face of the phone, sent up a balloon, said it wasn’t all right, and my father appeared at the dorm door, simultaneously bigger and smaller than I remembered. He packed my bags, tucked me among school-branded blankets in his back seat and drove me to a hospital where I celebrated my birthday without anything sharp around me.

Then we were twenty-one, you and I. You with pills of hair rolled between finger and thumb. You, a scar-slashed wraith too thin with loving dead things. You turned your face from the birthday cake, sugar flowers and plastic utensils of no help to you. You, with your death wish and bandaged wrists, a vision of a future I had only approached in dreams. I gobbled my slice, ate for both of us.

In group, we chose colors from cheerful boxes. Raw umber. Periwinkle. Pearl. Everything on your page was shadow, was pale. In our shared room, I gabbled in panic, seeing how much I did not want. You turned your face to the wall, as good a blankness as any, and I held my breath in case the thing you harbored was contagious. When you left – wheeled away ¬– I breathed freely again. I breathed for us both, knowing no feeding tube would save you from yourself.

I stayed. Until the frost on the window edges no longer filled me with dread. Until my limbs thawed. Stayed until I could see twenty-two bobbing and ducking out on the horizon. Until I came to see that winning and waking can be the same thing,

Now we are twenty-two and hurricanes are gorgeous blips on the radar where they belong. If you were here instead of barely taking up space in a plot, you would see that I am wearing jewelry that makes no noise. You would see how I pull the sugar flowers from cupcakes and let them dissolve under my tongue.