I was thinking, This is such a small moment, housed in such a small space, but it will spin like a planet in my memory. Peter’s body and mine had hardly ever touched. He’d never held my hand or my waist; we’d never occupied the same material space for longer than a class period. Yet I had given him my words. From the first tentative ink stroke I put down on paper, I knew I was writing to him. The weight of each word and the shape of each line, the vibrance and surprise of each image—everything I wrote was for him, intangible gifts I imagined him opening and taking inside his mind for
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