I keep the lights low because they tell the truth about a room. You can’t lie to a dim bulb. It leaves all the small betrayals visible — the coffee ring on the nightstand, the stack of notebooks pretending to be a future, the echo of a voice that said, “I’ll call you back,” and then turned into weather. I’ve lived long enough to see my name turn into weather.

There was a time I believed in softness the way other men believe in engines or money. I mailed a letter to a woman once, careful script, a stamp like a prayer. She never wrote back. Her silence returned heavier than any parcel, and I’ve been paying its postage ever since.

People think the bottle is the point, but it’s just a door you never meant to open, then can’t remember how to close. I didn’t drink to forget; I drank to thin the air between me and the ache — like pressing a bruise to be sure it’s still yours. Some nights I stopped because I wanted the pain clear, like glass. Some nights I started because I wanted it blurred, like rain on a windshield. Either way it stayed.

I tried to be easy to love. That was my first mistake. If you walk softly through a cruel world, the world calls it an invitation. Most days I felt like an open window in hurricane season. People admired the breeze. Nobody stayed.

The neighbors talk through walls like the living and the dead share a hallway. On one side a couple argues about money; on the other, a television sells things that promise a fresh start. I don’t believe in fresh starts anymore. I believe in what keeps starting even when you beg it to stop. Like morning. Like memory. Like that soft part of me that refuses to die no matter how carefully I starve it.

I wrote poems in spiral notebooks, whole galaxies of phrases that could not save me. I wrote the word love so many times it started to look like a scratch I’d worried into the page. I wrote the word stay once, and the paper ripped clean through.

No one taught me how to be a person who keeps going. They taught me how to be polite while sinking. They taught me how to apologize for drowning quietly, so as not to disturb the guests. I learned to applaud other people’s survival stories with hands too numb to clap for my own.

I sit in the half-light and listen to the dog in the next apartment. He knows everything. He knows the moment I stand, the moment I falter, the moment I try to swallow the sky. When I weep he presses his body against the wall like a doorstop against a bad wind. Dogs believe you without paperwork. Dogs don’t make you audition for worth.

There’s a mirror across the room. It’s cracked the way truth gets cracked: nobody means to break it; they just can’t carry it without dropping something. I look at myself and try to remember if there was a version of me that wasn’t composed entirely of after. After they left. After I failed. After the last good thing forgot my name.

Rage arrives in me like a weather front: a hot gust, a pressure change, birds going silent. It’s not rage at a person, not really. It’s rage at the vacancy that follows people around and sits down in your chair when they leave. It’s rage at the empty place where I thought love was supposed to happen, like a train platform where announcements keep apologizing for delays. “We appreciate your patience,” the loudspeaker says into the bones. But patience, like everything else, runs out.

I’m not brave, but I am thorough. I inventory my heart and find rooms I never visited because I kept them clean for guests. The dust, insulted by my attention, rises up in small storms. On one shelf sit the words I wanted to say to my father; on another, a poem I would have read at a wedding that never occurred; and in the corner, a chair with the imprint of a body that didn’t stay long enough to leave a dent. My museum of almosts, admission perpetually free.

The sadness is not theatrical. It doesn’t throw itself down and wail. It’s a clerk who never clocks out, a hum you no longer hear until someone asks, “Do you hear that?” Then you can’t stop hearing it. It files every hour under insufficient. It prints a receipt for every failure and hands it to me with professional courtesy. I sign each one, years of signatures, my name getting smaller until it’s just a line.

And fear — fear is the usher that keeps me in my seat long after the story should have ended. I am afraid of dying alone, yes, but more than that, I am afraid of being unwitnessed. I can imagine the act, but not the absence, the way the room would go on arranging itself without me. Mornings I am not in. Afternoons where my cup dries into a fossil. Nights where the hallway learns my silence by heart and recites it to the radiator.

If I am confessing, let me confess this: I wanted to be ordinary. I wanted groceries and someone who remembered which bread to buy. I wanted a voice calling from the other room, asking if we were out of coffee filters, and the dull joy of answering yes. I wanted to be bored with a person and grateful for the privilege. But I was always either too much or not enough — a door stuck open, or a door that wouldn’t open at all.

Once, in a plastic chair under a church basement’s fluorescence, I said my name to a room of soft nods and folding chairs. “Keep coming back,” someone said, and I did, until my last sincerity ran out and my smile became inventory. No one was unkind. That’s the worst part. Evil I could have fought. Kind indifference has nothing for the fists to do.

Tonight the air feels like a verdict. I hear my name in the static of the heater. I count the cracks in the ceiling the way sailors count stars. The dog gives a single, decisive bark, as if to insist that I remain at the center of the sentence. I write a note and tear it up. I write another and fold it twice. I make promises to nobody and keep them for a minute.

If you asked me what I want, I would say: sit with me in the dark awhile. You don’t have to light anything. Just breathe at a human pace. Remind the room how it’s done. I don’t want to be saved. I want to be with. Saving implies a ladder; with implies a hand. I have always preferred hands to ladders.

I go to the mirror and practice the face I would make if someone loved me. It isn’t convincing. Love has a way of ironing out certain creases, and I never learned how to fold my grief so it wouldn’t wrinkle the whole garment. Still, I try. Still, the face refuses the lie.

The word stay returns. It taps the glass like a moth. It cannot break through, but it will not give up. I think of the dog, patient scholar of my collapse. I think of the woman who didn’t write back, and how that silence tutored me too well. I think of the boy I was, furious that the world made a game of chairs and stole his every seat. I want to tell that boy I kept standing as long as I could.

This is where the confession sharpens: I don’t know how to survive myself. I know how to disappear into the corner of a crowd, how to apologize in advance for needing anything at all. I know how to make a poem out of the ache and call it a life. But some nights the poem is only a key to a door that opens into a room with another door. Infinite architecture. No bed.

I listen for the dogs in the neighborhood, low conversations exchanged in code. They are not praying — they’re verifying. Are you there? one asks from two blocks over. Yes, the other answers. Yes, I am still here. The night is full of that old catechism, a choir of existence. It pulls a thread through me I thought was broken. I consider — this is embarrassing — I consider barking. Just the once. Just to mark myself on the map.

Instead I speak my own name. I say it out loud like a strange blessing: “Thomas.” I say it again: “Thomas.” It sounds like someone else, which comforts me. If I am someone else, maybe I can wait this out. Maybe the storm will spend itself against the walls and, finding me unbroken, will have to move along.

I sit. I pick up the phone. It is heavier than grief and lighter than hope. I scroll through names that are more idea than person, ghosts I keep fed with holidays and the occasional birthday. I do not press call. I press back, then notes, then new. The blank screen offers me the cleanest lie in the world: You can begin again. I don’t believe it. But I can pretend long enough to make a line.

I type: I wasn’t looking to be saved. I just wanted someone to sit with me in the dark. The sentence holds. It fits around me like a seatbelt, not a rescue, just restraint. I imagine how it would look printed and pinned to the fridge with a magnet shaped like an orange slice. I imagine a hand touching the paper in passing, the way you touch a memory to prove it is solid.

I keep typing. I confess to the dust and to the dog and to the light that refuses to commit. I confess to the rage that keeps asking for a fight and the sadness that keeps handing out scorecards. I confess to the fear that narrates my absence before I’ve even left. I confess to the love that, stubborn as moss, keeps greening what I declare dead. I confess to wanting the ordinary miracles: mail that includes my name for tender reasons, keys that turn, the sacred boredom of a person who has nothing to fear from nightfall.

I do not promise anything beyond this sentence. I promise this sentence. I will stay for the next line, and the line after that, and the dog’s next bark that means I hear you, and the neighbor’s kettle rising like a question, and the good, clean hiss of the radiator rehearsing how to be a sea. I will stay long enough to be bored, if boredom is what waits on the far side of this cliff.

If there is a god, let him be the god of small continuances: of switching the light bulb before it winks out, of washing the one cup and leaving it in the rack like a little moon, of answering the soft animal next door with the patience a creature deserves. Let him be the god of hands, not ladders.

It is late. The mirror keeps its truce. The room doesn’t forgive me, but it allows me. The phone is warm now, a small animal deciding I might be safe. I save the note and set the device down like a nestling. I pull the chair closer to the wall we share, the dog and I, and rest my palm against the paint.

“I’m here,” I say, and wait for the answering thump of his tail, a Morse code that spells out the only word I can believe in tonight.

Stay.