When I was just old enough to know when an experience was extraordinary but too young to realize I’d never see it again, my parents drove me to Pilot Mountain from my grandmother’s. I had been before and would be many times again, and I’m sure that I bitched and moaned about going; I detested both the drive and the hike for no good reason and as only a seven-going-on-eight-going-on-ten-year-old could. 

The circumnavigation of Pilot’s dome on foot doesn’t take long: an hour or two, perhaps. The rewards are befitting of the commitment: a handful of sheer crags that spit cold water drops onto the bills of baseball caps, some two or three views of Carolina’s skin, parceled and painted in earth tones, no two plots of the same color adjacent, like a cold old woman’s quilt pulled over her bed at night. The feeling that one has accomplished themselves adequately for the day. 

Underneath one of the less impressive overhangs, there lie two or three rocks as tall as my diaphragm was at the time. I always thought of them as the “you’re on your way down” stones because of their placement at the climax of the trail. On this day, though, they were caked from top to bottom, across their width, and in a wide puddle around them, with thousands of ladybugs. These days, I would describe those rocks as the grey skin of a tubercular patient, or one stricken with the bubonic plague: forehead slick with sweat and coated with feverish boils which, irritated, pulsed in crimson spheres. But not when I was eight.

When I was eight, it was simply an astounding number of ladybugs, easily the most that I or my parents had ever seen. I could smell them, I remember, as one can always smell a massive congregation of bugs. Not foul, just buggy. I will not claim to remember what I said or thought, but I know that I was awestruck and, crouching, watched them for minutes. Touched my finger to the rock like Adam pressing his index to God’s and let them climb onto my hand. Treaded as though in a minefield so as not to crush a single one.

…

I find you in the little round rolls of light grey lint that I brush from my bed sheets onto the carpet and in the raw pink grooves that the elastic of my boxers’ waistband leaves around my hips. You swirl in the foamy bubbles of toothpaste I spit at the drain and in the corners of my eyes before I wash my face. I make time this morning for my weekly shave, your least favorite day of the week, and wash all but the upper lip down the sink. You’d have loved the mustache.

At breakfast, today, I can feel you just across the table watching me eat. You don’t have anything, you rarely did. I’m still not accustomed to checking my phone at midday and finding that there’s nothing to answer: no good night, love, no good morning, baby; no midnight crisis or finished painting; no photo of your body to shield from the table next to me, hand cupped around your tiny likeness like a woman trying to light a cigarette on a city sidewalk; no I love you. It is a relief.

And I wonder if you find me still: if sometimes I fall out of your pajamas when you pick them up from the pile you left them in on the floor next to your bed when you stripped to go to sleep last night. Am I still in your nightmares? I had forgotten, until this morning, how you’d sit in my lap and whisper in my ear how cruel I’d been, how I’d called you hideous and embarrassed you and struck you like he had, and when you woke up, for a moment, for only a moment, you weren’t sure if it was true that your whole world had turned against you or if it had only been a dream. And you were so sorry and I was so sorry and neither of us had anything to do with it.

I’m not hungry anymore.

…

“I’ve gotta go home, baby,” I told her for a fifth time. “It’s like, eleven thirty, and it’s a school night.”

She didn’t go to school anymore, she couldn’t. It was too much to wake up and put on clothes and be a person all day, and she said wouldn’t be alive if she had to go, so she did assignments in her room with the blinds closed and the TV on and she texted me while I sat through class. It still fell on her to drive her brother to school if she wanted to keep the Honda, so I would meet her in the parking lot, and she’d hold me over the shoulders or wrap her fists around my pinkies until the first bell rang. Some days I only had time for a quick hug, but she couldn’t live without it. I think that she would have agreed with Basil Hallward: that a few minutes with somebody one worships mean a great deal.

She didn’t say anything back to me. With one hand I was massaging her scalp and the other had been roaming her but was now gently pushing her from where she lay on my chest. 

“Baby.” I was more insistent. 

“I don’t want you to go.”

“I know. I don’t either,” I lied, “but you know I’ve got to.” I hadn’t planned on driving to her house at all that Sunday, but she had had a rough one, and I was the only line of defense. 

Once the ritual began, there was always at least ten more minutes spent there. There was kissing to be done in the bed, swaying to be completed on our feet and in my arms, and an abridged version of both against the port side of my 2004 Subaru Forester in the dim streetlight before her house. Eventually I could pry her off and drive away, slowly around the bend, so that she could see me wave and I could see her crying in the yard.

On the way home, I thought about all that I had to do. Set the alarm because my parents would be in bed already. Pet my dog for a while, eat something. Shower the woman off me. Work for two or three hours, get the same amount of sleep. I thought about the angry pink lines up and down her legs, and the older white ones on her arms, still simmering but calming down, and the flesh she scraped clean off of her hips with her fingernails. I thought about how sweet she smelled and how her piercings tasted different in her face than they did in her nipples. I thought about how much she loved me, and wondered how I could ever be free without her death and whether I wanted to be and decided that I couldn’t. 

I thought about how I hadn’t seen a ladybug in years.

…

Most of me hopes you don’t find me at all: that I’m not clinging with the grout between the tiles of your shower or warming your bedside in your dreams. If someone had told me, driving home from your house, that in a year you’d be alive without me on your mind, I think I could have spun sidelong into the median and gone skittering, struck traction on a pothole or speed bump and rolled like a die on the asphalt, found rest sinking roof-down in a reedy cattail ditch, and been content that I had done enough. Been vindicated and innocent again.

But I don’t think it’s so. I think, like you are to me, I am in every darling and honey and lovebug that you hear. If you bump your hip against your car door, I’ll be there in your bruise’s resemblance to a hickey. I think, for years to come, you’ll find me in each graveyard, glovebox, and bedroom. I’ll linger at the bottom of your T-shirt drawer, between your thighs and between your teeth. Your camera roll. Your coffee cup.

I think so because I find you in all the same places.

I leave breakfast feeling a tad sick, not because of what I ate. I need a breather. Sitting down in the park nearby, I remember fall time in my home, where you are, and how sad and lacking it is compared with here. A golden retriever bounds after a tennis ball on the green, and I cannot help but smile watching her grey-haired owners tracking her wild, ridiculous, gleeful gait. The trees are alight with shades of fire and orange cinders drift slowly to the ground around their trunks. I can wear sweatpants comfortably in the cool, but the sun still warms my arms, and the arms of my chair crawl with tiny red and black spheres. 

I’m meeting my new sweet thing in a half hour, and she’ll hold my hand and tell me about her day. A gaggle passes me overhead in a slow, shifting V, southbound, and when I track their movement, my eyes fall on a lovely sepia mountain. Squirrels rustle the branches and young people mill about wearing backpacks or cradling coffees. Some wave at me across the park or stop to chat for a moment or two. It is autumn in Appalachia and I’ve got nowhere to be and nothing to do but sit outside, and my lungs are full and my eyes aren’t heavy, and I’m seeing my parents on my birthday, and I’m remembering how sweet and dumb my own beautiful dog was and how she would bound on her short stubby legs, and I’m going to get a cup of coffee in an hour, and I have started to see ladybugs again.