Then, before women, we had the faces of young boys.

Me, with my baseball caps, bow ties and blue jeans. K., in basketball shorts and blazers. I still wear color then: Abercrombie and Fitch, American Eagle, Old Navy. Plaids and stripes, lime greens and yellows. On the day I meet her she wears tie-dye and hemp.

She trades me a Lortab for Ritalin. We are fourteen.

A year later I tell her I love her.

But this is not a story about love. This is a story without it.

She smokes her cigarettes within a minute of the filter and ashes them. I leave mine halfway and tuck them into the box.

Are you tired? I ask her.

No. The word streams from her mouth in a single exhale. I breathe in the smoke, tonguing the texture.

It is eleven o’clock at night. Minutes later we are both asleep.

In the morning, we watch cartoons and drink strawberry smoothies. We are ten years old but we are twenty-one.

It is January, but indoors it smells of summer.

This is memory. There is where I go when I cannot get off the floor.

It is late May of 1999. Fifteen and curved into the shape of a crush. There are many: The Swim Team Captain. My Science Partner. My Next Door Neighbor.

Remember the color of your flesh before the marks of too much faith.

I would like to say that I recall the spring formal and hotel parties. This is not what I remember. I am in the garage with the telephone, the battery light flickering; K. is in the bathtub. I picture the cord falling into the water, my best friend electrocuted on the other end. I linger on the thought of her body, a long white cylinder laid to ash in a giant ceramic tray. She would lay still, in her open casket of tile and cement.

In Hell there are no words. There is no thought. No sound. There is only truth, suspended. But how do you translate space?

I hold the receiver to my ear for fifteen minutes before I realize it is dead. I am sitting in a golf cart and writing something on a piece of newspaper.

Hell is intellect.

He found my father’s pornography collection in the master bedroom. Centerfolds are different in magazines: air-brushed and exaggerated. But when you are in them.

I was eight when I first posed nude. I had no breasts and no hips, but when he took me I bled like a woman.

It is August. We are in a construction shed at the end of our street. My brother’s head is pressed against a carpentry saw; my violator is not a body, he is a pair of hands. If you tell anyone, he mouths, but there is no sound. His voice takes the shape of wood splinters trembling in the air. He turns on the saw.

I do not tell anyone for two years. My brother develops a stutter.

Years later, I still do not call him by name. Instead, I draw a picture of a stick man with no hands, a bloody chainsaw in the corner.

Silence is not love. It is where you go when you die. Remember there are no words.

K.’s brother had Cystic Fibrosis and died at fifteen. The local high school planted a tree and named a scholarship: the Clay Culver Award. She was adopted as he was dying. If they had a choice, she tells me, they would have picked me.

She is hidden under a down comforter when she says this; the fabric pushes against me when she speaks. In the darkness her words cannot be seen, each syllable released slowly, the vowels camouflaged against black. I wonder if she feels empty when they leave her, or just transparent. I am careful not to breathe.

When I close my eyes I return to the woodshed, the taste of sawdust dry in my mouth. There is a reason why the dreams we dream while awake are so much less vivid than the ones we dream unconscious. I do not sleep for two days.

A pack of cigarettes sits in butts on the table. We are fifteen. Or sixteen. I don’t know. There are cigarettes as far back as I can remember.

The first time I do heroin I am sixteen. I am in the bathroom of a coffee shop cutting lines on a compact mirror. I catch my reflection in the glass. Fear.

I take a hit. My face, inches from the surface; my breath, creating a fog. I close my eyes. I return to the woodshed. The flavor of splinters. August in Tennessee. The fog blurs him into a shadow.

I take another.

And another.

I imagine releasing my brother from his captor and destroying the saw. The woodshed on fire, my violator in smoke.

You're going to have to stop trying to defy the laws of gravity, or one of these days you're going to fall from a fatal height.

When you fall in love, where do you fall?

In love there are no words. There is no thought. No sound. There is only truth. But this is not truth; this is heroin.

When I come down, he is the saw. He cuts me into symmetry: into halves, quarters, eighths.

My senior year of high school I gather my fractions into a whole number and take the fall towards space. My hair catches on the edge of the earth just as I look down to see my lover consuming me in pieces. The parts that aren’t torn from my body I put into my pocket and pawn for cigarettes.

K. writes me the summer of my sophomore year in college. It has been fifteen months since I saw her last. I finger my engagement ring as I sign my letters: Love, if it exists.

But we know better than that.

Six weeks later, I leave my fiancée. K. writes: You know, Kellen, sometimes I think you’re the type who wasn’t made for the kind of love that settles down and builds lives together.

In tits we trust, I tell her.

That is true, she replies, but more disturbingly, in our emotions we trust. Or at least blindly follow.

For the next few weeks we are both convinced we need glasses.

A year goes by.

I write her when I graduate from college.

She responds in a pattern of letters. These are not words. They are the last twelve months, packaged into consonants and vowels.

She does not sign, with love.

Instead, she writes: You know what goes here.

2005