Here is a map of a lifetime, here is a childhood: “If you can’t be the best at something, it’s not worth doing at all”—this is a motto they gave to a little girl, in the place of a doll or a guitar or a home. Here are a handful of years, a catalogue of sadnesses and non-resolution and unnecessary p-r-i-d-e. Here’s a dream that never would have worked out. (Isn’t this how the rhyme goes? Here is a church, here is a steeple—)

—I have woken up drowning, eighteen years gone by, and this revolutionary new idea, it peers from beneath sleep-crusted eyes, it says

“Sometimes, nobody even knows who they are anymore”

because all you have ever wanted is to be somebody else, and all I have ever wanted is you,

and (here is the river that runs all the way through it) maybe, I think, laws of the universe permitting— maybe (please) we could fit, in some way.