When at a loss for words—during, perhaps, a time of want or desire, when one’s body is overwhelmed by light, as if by the effect of Ketamine or MDMA, when overwhelmed by the weight of the moment, the silence, the look of disappointment in a lover’s eyes— what do we call the moment, then, when the words are finally summoned, like a sparkle of fireflies, and by grace, by the mercy of the night, what was damaged has been restored? Freire spoke that one reads the world before they read the word, which suggests that the first stage of language is in the experiencing of a thing to the point of knowing; in this knowing, then—of song sparrows and house sparrows, of catbirds and European Starlings, of a lover’s wants and needs, one could say, genuinely, that knowing to the point of the words conjuring themselves is, perhaps, the truest form of love.

In Los Angeles, my lover drove me to the airport. It was mid-summer, and along the highway, the neon sun poked through a grove of palm trees, its corona pink with a thick haze of smog. In my youth, in the hope of producing a kind of love, I attempted to acquire the words to conjure a new world—of which I was god—not god as in God, but yes, as in the creator. After watching the television series WandaVision, I see now how foolish a person can seem when they want to be loved. Maybe foolish isn’t the word. Anyway, we stopped to eat ramen a few miles from the airport, and when we returned to the car and sat inside, she leaned into me and whispered the words, Don’t go. I whispered back, I don’t want to go. And yet I did. I flew back to LaGuardia on a red-eye flight. What is the word for the kind of sadness that comes from having to leave a place where one is loved? What is the word for a lover who says, I don’t want to go but goes?