I didn’t implode. Like a star. As stars and people do when they are weak. Like they show on TV. Like when the boy smashes his fist into a door and the girl —she curls up in a wet mattress and writhes in pain. Instead I turned and in my notebook, I wrote love and what I made of it. The one without teeth. The one that arrives mewling like a baby in winter and the midwife drapes it in soft cotton. I also wrote pines, birds, seed. Everything I loved— berries so red it dyed the tongue holy, bicycles and wind, even kites so high in the sky it touched god. And everyday I woke up and at dawn, I rebuilt, with the old tools you threw away — a chair, a nest, a road — a life.