Twitter tells me about the new deaths, the way a reluctant friend might. I’ve never been good with numbers, dates, rates, state lines, or sums and their parts. I look at a map of Los Angeles and I see Brooklyn. I see slim trees where there should be sea, my cracked hands where there should be sky. When I search the top left dresser drawer, I see the stack of letters and their envelopes, each only ever opened once, read once. All loosely arranged following the move.

On my laptop, a yoga instructor with a body like a quill pen says, Feel your eyes soften in their sockets. I don’t think this can be done, and not surrounded by boxes. I writhe on the floor like a sardine fighting against its can before surrender, and my dog barks as though I’m wounded. I pant because I am. He watches with worry and then boredom as I shadow puppet in the dark.

I wonder what the stranger who packed them into a box thought of the pile, the federal address in all caps on the front of each. Or if they simply dumped them in with the reference books, a purple picture frame, tangled cords. When I hold the letters it’s always as a single unit, with both hands loose like I’d grip an old photo, thumbs and index fingers barely touching the edges. There is nowhere to sink the thoughts that follow, nowhere to bury them without the risk of roots. I return them to the drawer, all of us away from the light.