The streets behave so much differently in the absence of traffic. They possess their stillness fully. You can cross the road anywhere you like, not just at the corners. I didn’t see anyone else. No joggers. No dogs on leashes, sniffing at the wet ground. The rain left a thin flesh of mud on the sidewalks, and since I didn’t come across even little cat prints or bike tire marks—I knew I was the first creature to emerge into the day. The first surveyor of the storm. The loneliness of it all soothed me.

What I remember about Ronnie Hersh, is that he looked like a 42 year old car salesman at 13. He slicked back his hair, and wore polo shirts with khakis and one of those weird fabric and metal looped belts that absolutely do not work. I have no memory of what his parents served for dinner or of a single topic of conversation or of literally a single other event that transpired. Except that he has an enormous battleship on a high shelf of his wall. Next to that was a white and brown teddy bear. Those must have been the first things I saw because my memory only houses two other objects: A small TV and a SNES.

The nearest galaxy to the Milky Way, our nearest interstellar neighbor, is Andromeda. At 2.5 million light years away, everything we see of it, even with the most powerful telescopes available, comes to us from a dead state, a permutation already reconfigured. Even though