As Roman and I stroll through Central Park on the way to my book launch, the Soviet poet Marina Tsvetayeva gets up from a bench and walks right by us. She sports her signature short hair and severe bangs, as well as her dark eyes, prominent nose, and beguiling air of doom. I am not completely mad, yet—I know it’s not really her. She’s been dead for over seventy years, but I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately, ever since I learned she also suffered from insomnia, a condition that has plagued me for almost six months and counting now. Roman doesn’t think my obsession with the poet is healthy, and I don’t blame him, but when he says, “Earth to Oksana?” I decide to come clean.  

“Sorry,” I say. “I could have sworn Tsvetayeva just passed by.”

“You want to say hello? You can go ahead, but I have a book launch to go to.” 

I try to laugh it off. “I know it wasn’t really her.”

“Thanks for clearing that up.” 

He is more than a bit frustrated with me. My insomnia has kind of ruined everything in our home back in Iowa City, converting it into a nightly torture chamber where I roam the downstairs of the house like some unappeased ghost, begging for mercy while our eight-month-old, Sasha, sleeps peacefully and Roman tries to get himself to bed whenever he’s not frantically applying to academic jobs, though I occasionally do harass him and beg him to hold me to help me rest, or force him to sleep by the bathroom on a shitty mattress I ordered on Amazon so I can try to sleep in the bedroom on my own. 

I told myself I wouldn’t think about the hellscape we left today, though we’re already approaching my seven o’clock self-appointed bedtime. Roman thinks I should focus on the positive, like the fact that my novel is fucking out today, instead of, for example, spending my time online looking for sleep cures or worrying that nobody has reviewed my book yet. As we leave the park and approach the bookstore on the Upper West Side, I attempt to prepare to be celebrated even though I can’t think of a person who deserves to be celebrated less than me. Charles Manson, maybe. Stalin. Casey Anthony.  

“This should be fun,” I say, trying to sound like I mean it. 

“Of course it should,” he says carefully. “This is a big deal, Oksana.”

“I know that,” I snap, and then we’re quiet the rest of the way to the store. 

The Bookmark is next to a yoga studio and a ramen shop and is bright with shiny wooden shelves and a room in the back for the reading, which I see is inexplicably full with all of the people I know and love: my oldest friend, Lily, high school friends, college friends, grad school friends, even my editor, and I feel warm and loved, I’m being hugged and talked to like it’s my wedding day, I am dizzy with joy, briefly forgetting my nighttime suffering. 

The next thing I know, I am being introduced by the events manager and reading from my grandmother-inspired Great War novel, focusing on a scene between the grandmother and the granddaughter-based-on-Oksana character, where the granddaughter does a handstand to cheer up her grandmother after she’s been talking about eating a dog during the war. I am getting into it, I am even making people laugh, but when I look up, Tsvetayeva is in the front row, staring at me with her hands on her lap, and I shake my head and see it’s only dear Lily.

After I read, I answer a series of questions posed by my kind, hopeful friends, and in fact there’s not a stranger in the crowd because no one has heard of my book, because these people are here out of pity and I don’t deserve it. Only the last question trips me up, which is when my college friend Rachel throws a kind softball about my literary influences. Suddenly, I panic. The clock on the wall makes me twitch; at home, I covered the clocks because they freak me out, just highlighting every single minute that passes as I fail to drift off. I remember who I am, a psychopath insomniac posing as Oksana the writer. 

“My biggest influence is Marina Tsvetayeva,” I say. “Nobody knows the darkness like she does. In fact, I just saw her walking through Central Park.” The crowd is so silent I can hear people blinking, and I realize I have scared them. “What I mean is, she’s been on my mind a lot lately, and I’ve kind of seen her everywhere. I haven’t gone completely crazy, people!” I get a few laughs. “I guess I haven’t been sleeping enough, anyway, thank you, let’s have fun at the after-party—Joe’s, three blocks west!” Everyone claps and claps, maybe imagining the decade-plus of hard, thankless writing that finally got me here, and it’s all too much, I can’t believe it. 

I sit behind towers of my book and begin signing the copies. First in line is Rachel, an ER doctor with two kids who never complains about sleep, Roman’s favorite friend of mine because she has no ambitions of glory and is perfectly happy where she is. 

“I’m so freaking proud of you,” she says. “How do you feel? You must feel amazing.” 

“Something like that,” I tell her, and she looks so upset that I laugh, I don’t want to let her down. “Overwhelmed, but great,” I say, signing her book. “Really. You didn’t have to come,” I say, which is the closest I can get to thanking anybody. 

Roman’s in the back, chatting with a few friends of his who live in New York, waiting for the line to dissipate, and Lily comes up to me. “Girl, I left my book at home, but damn, you killed it! The part where you walked on your hands? Fuck!”

“It wasn’t me. It’s fiction,” I say with a smile. And I have my doubts about her actually buying the book, which is fine. Lily is Rachel’s opposite, Roman’s least favorite Oksana friend, because he thinks her free-spiritedness is phony, that she’s just troubled and sucks me into her problems. She hangs around until I run out of books to sign, which is when Roman returns to me.

“No more books,” I say, realizing I have yet to sign a copy for him.

He smiles. “That’s a good thing. You’ll get me later.”

“I should have saved one. Sorry.”

He throws up his hands. “Who knew you’d be so popular?” he says, but I can almost see it, he’s actually fucking proud of me. 

Lily says, “Did you really see your poet lady muse out there?”

“I think so.” 

“Oksana sees what she wants to see,” says Roman. 

“Let’s go find her then,” Lily says. 

I look around. There are still a few people I have to say hi to, some high school friends, the events manager, and then I have to shepherd everyone to the bar down the street, and people are already heading toward the exit, fussing with their coats. Honestly, I’d rather be in the dark park searching for a dead poet than hang out with these people—people whom I have come to call sleepyheads, i.e. the rest of society who are able to rest at night instead of being a psycho like me—who love and care about the old me, while the real, current me is out here pretending I’m so fucking grateful for this big day when all I want is to be incinerated by the black sun. Besides, since I got on my anti-anxiety meds a few weeks ago, I had to stop drinking, which will make the night even more unbearable, isolating me further, Oksana on an iceberg of sobriety and sleeplessness. 

“Sounds like a plan,” I tell Lily. “Let’s go.” 

Roman sighs and shakes his head. He helped me plan the after-party and took two unpaid days off from teaching at the community college in Iowa to come to New York with me. “You can’t be serious,” he says. “This is your party, Oksana. What am I supposed to tell everybody?”

“I’ll be back before you know it,” I tell him, and he doesn’t stand in my way.

“She’s in good hands,” Lily says, and Roman holds back a laugh as he waves us off.

 I’m hurt he doesn’t put up more of a fight, but then again, I’ve made his life hell, and spending a few hours in a bar in Manhattan with mutual friends without his lunatic wife isn’t the worst fate in the world. At least one of us should be allowed to enjoy this night, and since I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t enjoy it if Ryan Gosling started ardently making love to me or my book hit the New York Times bestseller list or everyone who had ever doubted me groveled at my feet and called me a genius, I’d like my husband to take a stab at having some fun. 

◆

Lily regales me with her latest romantic drama as we enter the park. The last time she really got into her dating life was a few months ago, when I called and asked if she had any insomnia cures I hadn’t tried (she suggested self-compassion, and I told her I had tried it and it didn’t work), but she seems to have had a decade’s worth of relationships since then. There was a married couple she was involved with for a while, but she liked the woman more than the man, and that created a problem. Then she dated a woman she met at a tea ceremony but her heart wasn’t in it. She went back to a guy she knew from when she worked as an herbalist, but that fizzled out when he got too serious, and then she started up with a woman from her yoga studio, but things were iffy with her now.

“You know,” I say, craning my neck as we enter the park, “Tsvetayeva was bisexual. But in the end, she couldn’t do it. She wrote this love letter to her mistress explaining it was unnatural because they couldn’t have kids together. It’s heartbreaking, really, you can tell how badly she wants to be with her.”

“Her loss,” Lily says. 

“Right,” I say, but I’m distracted, checking all the benches for Marina.

“Fuck, man,” says Lily. “You’re really looking for that poet slut.”

“She was hardly a slut,” I say, but I am disappointed Lily did not take me seriously. 

“I just thought you were like, looking for an excuse to get out of there? I thought we’d go to my party?”

“Your party?”

She stops in her tracks and gives me a little shove. “I know I told you about my party,” she says. She manages to be striking even under the garish streetlights, with her hair half-buzzed while the other half falls into her enormous eyes, her thick lips luscious and ready for trouble. She has only gotten more gorgeous since high school, while I have faded like a painting abandoned in the sun. 

“Right,” I say. “Your party.” I do remember a text about how she’s having a “little soiree” after my reading on the other side of the park. “Let me just make sure she’s gone,” I say, checking a bench beside an icy lake. 

“Couldn’t hurt,” Lily says with a shrug, but she watches me warily. 

This is why Lily is my best friend: she links arms with me and we walk around the lake and she does not judge me, she helps me with my search and listens as I complain about my sleep problems for the millionth time. I tell her I have tried beyond everything, in addition to the Buspirone I take regularly: every kind of white noise, train sounds, laundry noise, valerian root, lavender on my pillow, melatonin, meditation, yoga, yoga nidra, cardio, breathing exercises, mantras, sleep restriction, regular therapy, sleep therapy, Hydroxyzine, Xanax, Lorazepam, Alprazolam, NyQuil, Ambien, ZzzQuil, Unisom, CBD, and CBT, but nothing seems to work for more than a few days in a row. 

I sigh and say, “My therapist is like, If you could stop this, wouldn’t you?” 

“I can’t argue with that, girl, it sounds like maybe you’re trying too hard.” 

“That’s kind of what I do.”

“Having said that,” Lily says slyly, “I think maybe there’s one thing you haven’t tried. You just have to keep an open mind, okay?” 

“Oh hell no,” I say as we follow a bike path around the lake. “I don’t think an acid trip will really open my mind—”

“That’s not it. My friend Passionflower—well, I told her about you, and I think she might be able to help.”

I snort. I am pretty sure no human has ever been helped by their friend’s friend Passionflower, but I am all out of ideas and hear myself laughing for real. I throw up my hands.

“What could go wrong?” I say. 

◆

The party is at the Upper East Side apartment of a yoga client of Lily’s, a businesswoman who has no family and lives gloriously alone. Lily is housesitting while she is in Italy. I want to hate the woman when we enter, but her home is tastefully decorated and has a perfect view of the park, and she seems to be one of those people who is so rich that she actually knows not to show it off. There are photographs of mountain peaks and rainy city squares where the woman no doubt has traveled alone, and several glass bookshelves peppered with trinkets of wooden llamas and goats and Japanese fans and even a Russian doll. Maybe I do hate the rich independent bitch a little bit. Who could blame me? 

Lily whips everything up in seconds, throwing carrot sticks and celery and homemade hummus on a table along with tiny candles and just one chilled bottle of white wine, because Lily is all into wellness now, having recognized that she was a fun but destructive drunk.

“Not bad,” I admit, and then there’s a knock on the door and a tall, pale, gorgeous wavy-haired blonde woman emerges, whom I gather is Passionflower.

She peers into my soul with her green eyes as she shakes my hand. “Right this way,” she says, and I follow her down a dimly lit hallway. 

“Get it, girl,” Lily says. 

“Passionflower is like the one thing I didn’t try to help me sleep. I heard it was bullshit,” I tell her, and instead of laughing, she frowns at me like I’ve already let her down. 

This room where she leads me is meant to be very relaxing, a yoga room with a hardwood floor, wax candles, paintings of the ocean, and smooth white furniture that just freaks me the fuck out, I would take a pile of dirty laundry and overflowing box of baby toys any day over this fake shit, though I remind myself that I am desperate. 

“The first thing I need you to do is to relax,” she says.

“Good luck with that,” I say, and again I fail to make this relaxed bitch even smile. 

“I have a long waitlist of people who want me to help them relax, all right? Lily begged me to help, so here I am,” she says, and she scolds me so meanly that I am reminded of all the teachers who chastised me when I was a stubborn kid, that I tell myself that if I can’t relax, I can at least try not to make jokes. 

“There’s no such thing as insomnia,” she tells me.

I crack up, though I told myself not to. “Oh, is that right?” 

“If you can’t sleep, then you are unsettled in your daily life. There must be something keeping you up.”

“What’s unsettling me is that I can’t fucking sleep.” 

 And what else? There’s the fact that my novel doesn’t seem to be making a splash. That it’s already March and Roman and I have applied to 200 jobs while our only lead is his interview at a school in fucking Alabama. Oh, and that our eight-month-old is eating up most of my time, though she’s the only reason I haven’t offed myself, a gorgeous perfect girl I can’t enjoy because I am so fucking sleepless. “If it goes on much longer, I’m going to jump off a bridge,” I add.

Passionflower is unfazed. “You just had a little one, right?” she says. “The mother role isn’t something you naturally fall into. It takes work. It’s completely unnatural, actually.”

“Now that’s something I can get behind.” 

I lie down and she puts several pillows under my head and knees and on my pelvis, and I close my eyes, picturing my breath moving from my lungs all the way down my body  and out through my feet as she tells me to do, and it’s amazing, I actually feel myself letting go, my daughter is not there and Roman is not there and Lily is not there, and I am free, my hands tingling as Passionflower chants, “You welcome peace, you welcome peace, you welcome peace…there is nothing you have to do, there is nowhere you have to be. When you climb into bed tonight, you will let go and your body will be free, from your toes all the way up to the top of your head.”

I nearly drift off until my phone dings, reminding me that there actually is somewhere I have to be, namely my book after-party, and I shut it off and she’s glaring at me like I just slapped her in the face. “Er, sorry,” I mumble, and close my eyes and try to get back to hypnosis mode, but she has lost me completely as she goes on about breathing into the inside of my throat.

 Instead, I remember one night in college when my sorority brought in a hypnotist to encourage bonding, and she hypnotized one nice, energetic Midwestern girl to feel “unadulterated joy,” which led the girl to basically scream like she was having an orgasm in front of a hundred girls; she was so embarrassed afterward that she quit the sorority. 

I hear more knocks on the front door, sitar music coming on, the rumblings of a party at work, which seems to further annoy Passionflower, as if this too is my fault, as if she can tell I’ve been thinking about my sorority while she’s trying to work her voodoo on me. She sighs and tells me to rub my hands together and place them over my eyes to wake myself up, but we both know I am already alert. She stands, and I realize she’s expecting me to thank her, so I do, but I don’t really mean it, and I think she can see that as she slinks toward the door.

“Think of sleep as a cautious bird. You can’t chase after it, or you’ll scare it away. You have to be gentle and wait for it to come to you,” she says. 

“What kind of a bird? Like a peacock, or an owl—or is it more like a pigeon?” I say, but she just sighs and walks away, silently—I’m sure—declaring me hopeless. 

I stand by the window, staring out at the dark, gorgeous park, where there are no people in sight except maybe a lurking Tsvetayeva. I’m relieved I don’t see any buildings with their mean yellow lights, which would only lead me to my usual unproductive lines of thinking: there is yet another group of sleepyheads who all know how to fucking get to bed without incident. What the fuck is wrong with me? 

 But the only person I am thinking about is Roman. I remember his calls and check my phone, where a slew of his inquiring texts have come through, first voicing concern, and then anger, followed by a text from Mama, who is watching my daughter back in New Jersey, asking how it all went. But I ignore them all and just stare at a picture of my daughter mid-crawl, her eyes two blue expectant moons, wanting so many things I cannot give her.

◆

I find myself in the middle of a dance party, not like the parties from when I lived in the city in my twenties and danced to Top 40 in cramped apartments, when there was considerably more coke and less kombucha, but there’s still a connectedness to all of it, people are swaying to some kind of mystical world music. I don’t feel excluded though I only know Lily and Passionflower and Sue and Lesley, Lily’s college friends, and I’m stone cold sober while everyone is daintily sipping wine and smoking weed. Lily pulls me into the chaos. There I am, swaying between her and Passionflower, trying to forget my handsome husband who is celebrating me without me, my dear husband who hasn’t been out by himself in a while. 

Lily is suddenly calling for me to walk on my hands, no doubt recalling the scene I read from earlier, a trick I used to do soberly for our friends in the parking lot outside our high school and then drunkenly in college, which I had to give up all together after I did it once outside a bar to impress Roman early in our courtship and woke up with such a stiff neck that I had to spend the weekend in bed. But now Lily is clapping, clapping, and everyone is chanting, “Oksana! Oksana! Oksana!” and there are certainly worse forms of peer pressure out there, so what can I do but give in? 

I nearly feel drunk, drunk from the music, from recklessly fleeing my launch and having a night off from my daughter, and it couldn’t hurt to follow this bliss, so I do get upside down, and as I walk all around the room clapping my feet, I am never scared, my balance is perfect, my hands are rooted in the ground like tree trunks, my hair falls down in all directions, blood rushing to my head while I show off my completely pointless talent, one that won’t win any awards but which just feels really fucking good to do. 

But then, upside down, I see Tsvetayeva, and she’s not impressed by my antics, she’s got her arms folded over her chest, waiting for my act to be over, and it’s enough to make me pop back up, when I can feel the blood rushing to my head and see it’s just old Passionflower. 

I lift my hands in triumph as the room bursts into applause, and I bow like the show off that I am and it feels good, I haven’t shown off in a while, and I feel much more giddy and accomplished than I did when reading from my novel. And now, I am smiling for fucking real. The only time I have smiled lately is at night when I am having a panic attack, because I read online that smiling is supposed to trick your body into feeling happy, but it never worked. 

“Nicely done,” Passionflower says, and she looks less perfect, sweat glistening on her forehead after dancing so much, I hate her a little bit less. 

“See, you still got it,” Lily says, elbowing my side.

“Sure I do.” 

“Attitude!” she says, shaking her head. 

“I told you I’ve tried everything, remember? That includes positive thinking. It didn’t work,” I tell her.  

But she doesn’t chastise me further because I head to the bathroom. Passionflower gives my shoulder a little squeeze as I pass through the crowd. I have won her over at last. 

◆

I sit on the toilet and prepare to call my husband, but instead I scroll through more pictures of our daughter. Here she is in her high chair with her blonde feathery head, looking just like him, there she is pouting on a swing, now she’s in my arms, where I wear a bathrobe and look dead-eyed, after one of my many all-night-long benders, and there she goes, snuggling her dear stressed father in bed, the man who I can’t bring myself to call back. 

I scroll to a time BS, Before Sasha, and land on a picture of me and Roman in Davis, not long after I quit doing handstands. We’re at a party at his apartment, where I’m wearing a red romper and look tan and drunk and happy, a time where my biggest worry was whether or not to drop out of our Slavic Studies PhD program, which seems like a hangnail compared to the mess I’m in now. 

“Where the hell are you?” he says, when I call him at last. “Enough of these antics, Oksana. Come on.”

“Night!—Too long already I’ve peered into human pupils! Incinerate me, black sun, you that are—night!” I say, quoting my beloved muse. 

“Nobody wants to incinerate you, all right?”

“I bet you do.” 

“Stop this. Just come back to the party. People are asking where you are. Some of them came a long way to see you read.”   

“Don’t pretend it’s not more fun without me.”

He sighs. “Of course it’s more fun without you. But that’s not the point. You’re my wife and I want you here, all right?” 

I wait for him to elaborate, to delve into all the reasons he still loves me in spite of my collapse, but he just hangs up on me, as he should, giving me what I deserve. 

◆

In the candle-filled bedroom, Lily and I sit on the bed, facing a photo of her grandmother on the nightstand, her sweet Oma, who passed away not long after we graduated high school. My dumb little book sits behind the picture frame. I never should have doubted Lily; of course she got a copy. 

“I have my doubts about Passionflower,” I tell her. 

“Can’t blame me for trying,” Lily says. “You know what, Oxy? Maybe your therapist is right. You really can’t force these things. When my grandfather died, my grandmother started getting these terrible migraines that kept her in bed all day long—she never had a headache in her life until that point. She tried every herb she could find, but after a while, she just prayed a lot and surrendered to it. She accepted that she couldn’t change it right then.”

“And did it go away, eventually?”

“Well, she died during that period, but anyway, girl, she was old,” Lily says. 

I hold back a laugh—this isn’t exactly inspirational advice—and realize I should ask a different question. 

“Who do I surrender to, if I don’t believe in God?”

She laughs. “Just surrender to the universe, girl.”

She pulls back the covers and I climb under with her. This bed is the world’s softest cloud and smells like incense and lavender and detergent and is mushy and warm and lovely. The covers are dotted with tiny sunflowers and are as soft as a welcoming bosom. Mountains of pillows surround us on both sides. Lily leans into me, snuggling her head onto my chest. 

“I’m going to stay up all night with you, okay? We’ll face the night together and you’ll see there’s nothing to be afraid of, the night’s just a dumb little cunt. Deal?” she says.
“Deal.” 

She strokes my hair and kisses my forehead and closes her eyes. Her headachy grandmother is smiling benignly at us from the photograph, begging us to get cozy. 

Lily starts snoring almost immediately, and I do not hold it against her. I close my eyes and wonder if I can drift off—sometimes, counting Roman’s snores beside me does the trick, though most of the time those uninhibited sounds just mock me for not being able to let go like all the world’s fucking sleepyheads—but I feel that pounding that travels up my throat and into the sides of my neck, the sweat pooling in my chest, the panic that arises when everybody else is relaxing, and I know it’s a no-go. I grab Lily’s copy of my novel and then I slip out of the room, pass the dancing guests, and let myself out.

◆

As I follow a path by the lake past two men walking their dogs, I think of her again, the hypnotist who entranced my sorority sister into feeling the most pleasure she had ever felt in her life. What would I do if she asked me to feel “unadulterated pain”—which is what I feel now, as alone as the last birch tree in a vast tundra, filled with so much self-loathing that I can’t stomach anyone’s touch except Lily’s? Before this, I would have guessed it would be like that scene in Garden State where Natalie Portman and that one guy scream in the rain to release their anger and sexual frustration, and though I’m alone in a park and this would be a good time to scream, I can’t even work up a yelp or a single tear. I’ve hardly cried at all since the plague began. 

After I pass a fountain and a statue of a man and his dog, I see Tsvetayeva again, sitting on a bench in the darkness. Her short hair is unkempt and her beak nose and long lashes are cast in shadow. She committed suicide, I remind myself, that’s how she died, her husband and daughter were arrested and the state turned on her and she couldn’t get work and the war was on and she couldn’t take it anymore. I don’t know why I expect her to tell me what to do. If she knew how to sleep at night, then she wouldn’t be wandering through the park. 

She has her head down and her hands folded on her lap, a black bag by her side. From her clothes, she looks respectable, not like someone who should be falling asleep in the park. Since all of my thoughts are rooted in selfishness, my concern for this lost creature turns to jealousy—why does everyone else in the fucking world have no trouble falling asleep, even in the middle of the park on a brisk evening? I shake the girl’s shoulder, harder than I planned to, and her eyes pop open in horror.

“Wake up,” I tell her. “It’s not safe here.” 

She runs a hand through her hair and stands up, grabbing her bag. She looks nothing like Tsvetayeva. Her hair is long and dark and her nose is not nearly as prominent. 

“Shit,” she says. “What time is it?” 

“I don’t really look at the clock anymore,” I tell her, “but it’s late.” 

“Thanks,” she says, a bit confused, but also still groggy. 

“Hey,” I say. “Do you have a pen?”

She blinks a few times, rummages through her bag, and hands me a pen before scurrying off. I sit on her bench for a minute and take out Lily’s copy of my book and inscribe it to my dear husband.

◆

I don’t realize it’s Roman at the bar right away because the back of his head is so gray, which I could have noticed on any of the given days we were in the same room together, but my mind has been invaded by someone who wants to kill me, so things have slipped through the cracks. His hair looks good under the dim lights of the bar, but it also breaks my heart because of course it was the last few months that did that to him, months that I have ruined with my restlessness. 

He’s talking to Rachel. They’re not necessarily flirting, but they could be, because he’s a good-looking guy and funny and charming and all the right things, people should be attracted to him, he deserves the attention. Rachel waves at me and gets up to talk to a few remaining college friends huddled in the corner, knowing we need time alone. A clock hangs above the taps at the bar and I’m not scared by it, I just check that it’s not so late, it’s a quarter to midnight, whatever, night is a dumb little cunt like Lily says, it can’t hurt me for the moment. I approach Roman slowly, remembering Passionflower’s advice about the cautious bird. 

I take out the copy of my book and plant it on the bar.

“Where did you—” he says, looking genuinely happy and a bit surprised to see me. 

“I said I’d give you a copy, didn’t I?”

He picks it up and reads the inscription. You are my everything. I surrender.

“You don’t have to surrender,” he tells me, squeezing my hand. “You’re not under arrest.”

I try not to flinch from his touch and take a seat on the stool next to him. 

“I walked on my hands tonight,” I say.

 He laughs. “In the park?”

“At a party.”

“Did you hurt yourself?”

“No, actually. It felt good.”  

 He shakes his head. “Glad to hear it.” 

I take a sip of his beer and he doesn’t stop me. It feels good to be reunited with my old reliable friend alcohol, to feel his comforting fizz down my dry throat—he never actually hurt me, he only activated my wonder and love for my fellow woman. I wait for Roman to tell me I’m his everything, too, that everything is going to be okay and he forgives me for being a wreck, that he even understands me, that we are going to find jobs and have a second child and fuck regularly and I will close my eyes and sleep at night and I will not feel like this for much longer, or at least, please God I don’t believe in, not forever.

 “Did you find her?” he says, and for a moment I don’t know what he’s talking about. Then I remember Tsvetayeva. I look out the window of the dark bar, at the bright lights of the loud, impenetrable city. 

“Still looking,” I tell him.