One of the cats, yours, the cagey one, escaped out the front door. In her wild fear, she dug two ragged lines down the length of my forearm. For weeks, the red lines, crooked in their correspondence, couldn’t be unseen, and I became grateful for the disorder they declaimed on my body, in plain sight, a message you said couldn’t be true for me. That last New Year’s Eve, the hell apartment frozen over, the radio (big band music playing softly) kept me tethered to the earth, to the past, to the coming midnight, and to remaining intact, until you found me and cut the line.