We start with the girl. She has been experiencing something strange, flat masses of existence like stretching deserts, time that passes without her consent or her memory. She gets on the metro and does not know what she is doing there, and then goes to class, goes to work. It is hateful and dull and she feels it seeping into her skin. She is becoming hateful and dull.

There is the community kitchen—this much is true. There is the open-eyed pleasure of chopping, stirring, sizzling, the spoon and the scoop and the many cigarettes in lieu of being alone-alone. Thai coconut soup, stuffed zucchinis, Ethiopian wat, improvised sweet-potato sandwiches. There are the meetings, long and laborious, there is the women’s group who rub their hands together and spill like uncorked champagne. There are library books, sometimes, and friends who will rub her head and drink pitchers in dark bars where you are not supposed to leave your drinks unattended, and the faraway ones who tap out hopeful messages all night.

And then the boy, out of left field with dark and flashing eyes. She feels the first crack of the winter’s ice, she feels the beginning. She puts orange netting around this unsafe place in her heart, skirts it wide, warns even him.

But she gives in when one rattling night she dreams of running to the hole in the lake and plunging headfirst into the cold. It is a political action, setting up the tent in front of her university’s administration building, the two of them there in the cold in two sleeping bags. They curl together talking all night as the other activists doze off and she dreams hungrily of him, him, of a future that doesn’t seem quite so alone, of sunlight bouncing on hardwood floors while he cooks in his underwear. She dreams and then she does it, she takes him home and crooks her knee under her chin and they talk.

In between the curries and empty bottles and TV and protests and newspaper articles, they fall into something. She is afraid to call it love, afraid to let him call it love. He writes her a letter every night for the early mornings before school and she feels water rushing over the sandbags, the push and swell of life in that desolate place in her chest.

It is terrifying. She knows the tendency to call, to worry, to reach. It creeps back through her fingers, ignited when he stands her up, the familiar disappointment of no one coming. But there is something in there now, some courage or some whiskey when the bartender at work tops up her coffee.

So she fights. Pushes herself against the wind, legs pumping, hoping she won’t be too late. She holds his head and tells two hearts that it will be OK, falls into his lap, into his bed, into his arms even when it seems he does not want her there. Sometimes she doesn’t even get that far, ringing the bell while he sleeps soundly on his good ear. She fights herself for this, for the chance to be loved.

There are times when it is better and times when it is worst of all.