On a tropical vacation I fell very ill. I was 12 or 13 years old. It was on the first night of the trip that it happened, after an otherwise pleasant day of sunshine and white sand. We had never witnessed water so blue. Geographically speaking, I was three hours away from my home by plane, in another country, and this new country in which I found myself featured a different language and a different climate, and I had eaten a bad shrimp, probably, or had drunk forbidden water. This was thirty years ago. On that first night the four of us, my mother and father and sister and I, fell asleep in the same hotel room, my father watching a movie about the Nuremberg trials. I woke sick in the dark, that feeling of falling, and after the worst of it was over, lying in a hospital bed hours later, weak and empty, listening to the nurses speak in a language I could not follow, and between intermittent, semi-coherent and naive contemplations of hanged Nazis, of how little those few deaths mattered in the wake of millions, yet how satisfying the executions must have been to watch at the time, how relieving it must have felt to know that periods could be placed at the end of certain unspeakable sentences, I felt, perhaps for the first time in my life, or at least it felt like the first time—it always feels like the first time, doesn't it?—a deep, atom-shaped despair. A still image of my bedroom hung in my brain. A simple room, and I was heartsick for it. My parents were nearby, of course, as well as my sister, everyone who might have kept me safe and healthy, and who might have defined home in that way that books and movies and greeting cards insist upon, but we were all sick, had all eaten of the same bad shrimp and had drunk of the same forbidden water. I longed instead for something deathless. My own bed. The wicker lamp. The closet door that always ran off the track. I was a thousand miles away from everything concrete, from anything solid and inert that might orient me. All was loss. Lost. I closed my eyes. To escape my situation I would have to crawl across the minutes and hours, and eventually hundreds of miles and several bodies of water, and I would have to speak and listen and ask and reply, and I would have to sit upright, and walk in and out of rooms, and walk down hallways, and enter and exit vehicles of all shapes and sizes, and rely on methods of transportation that depended upon correct weather for their travel, and my body would have to cooperate, and would have to coordinate itself to the movements of those who might direct me on my journey, and the effort of all this, the undertaking, I immediately understood was beyond me. Escape was improbable, and therefore impossible.

In every hangover I feel it. In every binge, and in every sober night spent sleepless and blank in the dark, alone and grown up in my bed. In every news cycle. In my old age, as every person and place I've ever known or loved falls away and I, improbably, remain, I will feel it. I felt it when my husband left, and when my cat died in my arms, and when my father had a heart attack, and when my grandmother's house was sold off to strangers, and when my mother said she had cancer, and just today I felt it as I enjoyed an autumn afternoon. The despair was so dense back then, in that tropical paradise, that first time of first times, compacted into a furious molecule like the entire universe before it was split open by time and energy, complete and yet unknown to itself. And it keeps blooming and rising, and it expands, and expands, like John Donne's three-person'd god, like that killing cloud everyone said was exquisite, and shone in all colors, right before annihilation.

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A few years ago I found [a short documentary] about the soldiers who witnessed the nuclear test bombings in the 1950s. They stood in a trench less than a mile away from ground zero. The firsthand descriptions of the bomb's power and terrifying beauty disturbed me greatly. These men were haunted by the experience and could not share it. Even as they are telling it they cannot share it. Self-destruction, large and small.