He’s not so talkative, but the stars are out: there’s the Milky Way, there’s Venus! Not sure what that is, but it’s fucking beautiful, you say, pointing to the east, your voice ringing out like a bell.

He swears that he can feel them sometimes, phantom appendages on his back twitching and thrumming with unlived life. “I swear mummy. I swear.”

“Aaron met him in New Jersey, coming back from his twice-annual visit to his sister’s in Cherry Hill, and within twenty minutes he’d asked Max to come home—to live.”

“With O.J. there was an abyss of recklessness I was willing to dive into, a waxing appetite for danger I was unsure I could swallow.”

And, yes, even now, even for me, there is joy in seeing the rainbow flag in public, in one of the last places I expected to see it. There is joy in not quite knowing why it’s there, but knowing that it means something to the person who chose it.

“I understood that a crying man was not a gay man, and Stainless and I were not friends.”