I’m staring at your hands. You’re using them to clarify medical words; to make shapes; to draw diagrams to help me understand what my brain can’t make sense of …

It’s 1969, somewhere in Alaska, my first time on sentry duty for the United States Air Force; the middle of a December night, thirty degrees below zero, a guard shack in front of a nuclear weapons dump site.

The steel guardrail familiar against his knees. The straight, level bridge concealing its loftiness, the gorge below indistinct in the moonlight. [CW: suicidal ideation]

I was swinging ever higher on the swing mounted on a sturdy branch of the immeasurably ancient oak. And then I was on the ground …

In the picture, photographed in Burma, my grandmother is seated on the traditional teak chair in the veranda and my grandfather stands behind her in the shadows thrown by a padauk tree …