Over the past eight years, one thing that’s different is that I take longer breaks. I’ll sometimes go months without writing, which is not something I used to do. I used to write every day. I still take a lot of notes, but I think I allow myself more time to be receptive to the world, as opposed to always worrying about saying something. I think it’s very much a poet’s novel, which means it’s basically—a woman stands out in a field thinking about other times she stood out in a field. And I think a lot of my energy when living in the city was going towards the performance of being human. That idea of “Hello! Look, I got dressed today. Ta-da!”

It was as if the news of his cancer’s progression opened something inside of him so that he could clearly see into another world, another place he was on his way to. Whatever it was he saw endowed him with an overwhelming generosity of spirit and the most intense humanity I had ever witnessed. I don’t mean he wandered around performing good deeds; it was something more internal. He was overtaken by something like joy. Not a giggling and hysterical one, but a calming joy that infected every room he entered. ​ When you know somebody with less than six months to live and that person agrees to spend any moment of it with you at all, the immensity of that generosity does change you, undeniably. ​ —or, as my coworker, Jeff, used to say before he left the job and moved to California to be a social worker: Khalil is crackers, an arrival straight from the cracker factory. Why would the world endow this young boy with such wackiness, with the young Johnny Cash’s lopsided gait and pool-ball eyes, with the right amount of kindness to soothe the youngest children in the room and the right amount of self-assurance not to be intimidated by the presence of the older children, if he were not meant to live? I know that Khalil will be famous one day—a rock star, a basketball hero, a politician who will become the first Arab American President of the United States because he is so beautiful, and he knows suffering, and he will be cured, and I know for sure: he will live long enough to enter a presidential election, he will live long past thirty-five. ​ Some kids arrive in class sailing down the hallway on their IV poles ​ He never laughs anymore, and I thought I’d never hear him laughing again,” she said, and she was crying. ​ We enjoy ourselves in Writers’. ​ I helped him write—a loose hug that lasted at least the length of a single poem, but often, towards the end of his life, a hug that lasted the entire class.