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.

And there it is, what brought me here, the call that pulled me under: If only I could keep it like this. If only I could sit here and talk to you, deep into all night, despite sand fleas and sunburn, long after the days have run out from beneath all numbers for them.

As I learned how to dribble the ball and ran drills, I quickly picked up the nick-name “sugar foot” from coach Dan, when it became obvious in shooting drills that, no matter how much force I intended to put behind the kick, the ball would barely roll into the goal—if it did at all. These drills were without a goalie.

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