We sat at a chess table but we didn’t know chess. If it were a painting, men in hats would worry their pieces, stone shaped into horses and knights. Instead, we sipped seven-dollar matchas and apologized the way that girls do.

This is Washington Square Park as setting, smell, perfume bottle, precipice. Early morning, the sky bruised purple.

I tell a new friend that I do not believe that bad shit is inherently interesting. I don’t want to write a crazy story I tell her I want to write crazy words. A teacher stands at the front of a carpeted classroom and tells a semi-circle of students that it was Alexander Chee who said that it was Annie Dillard who said Put all your deaths, accidents, and diseases up front at the beginning.

The story is that one of my moms had cancer and then my other mom also had cancer and then one of my moms died, and yes, I have two moms, or had two moms, can never find my footing in this broken landscape of tense. The story is that it is 2025 and when I talk about my grief I still feel the need to clarify that yes, there is or was or were two of them, moms that is, making me, this recursive loss. The story is that sometimes it is humans who make death and disease, that bigotry and fascism are never an accident. The story is that lately I have this craving, to plug my head into sand and hope that it’s quick.

What I know is that it feels like a beginning. We sat in Washington Square Park and didn’t play chess. Across a stone table my closest friend confronted me, angry with pale lips, about a guy that she liked that I’d had sex with the previous night. I wanted to tell her that he was only mediocre, that he was mostly just beautiful. The truth was that he was beautiful enough that when we fucked I turned myself on with the knowledge that I was turning him on. I was twenty two with libido for ego.

I don’t want to write a crazy story but I am here, in search of beginnings. It was the day after the day that I didn’t play chess that my phone rang to tell me that my second mom also had cancer. Everything, always, can happen. A bicycle path bends to accommodate a tree, a scar splits a torso sternum to pelvis and bends to accommodate a belly button. In the grass I cry for a girl I just met, my ankles itch as I wonder if she’s me.