Every party was a way of not hearing the silence from a certain apartment in Queens.

I had built a life engineered, at bottom, around never being alone in a quiet room with myself — and I had called that success.

And there, under the Lincoln Center chandeliers, a memory I had paid a fortune in therapy to bury clawed its way up: thirteen years ago I had not been Roderick Wolcott, titan.

I had been broke and bitter and drowning, and there had been a woman who was my whole anchor — who saved every dollar from a small paycheck, who cooked soup on a rusted stove to warm my hands through brutal Queens winters, who looked at me as though I had hung the moon.

When I closed my eyes against the glare, it was not the scarlet dress I saw.