but I’m quietly thrilled by it, as this second evening of the year sinks into the season’s coldest night. We take our bikes north on the trail, return traffic on the George Washington Parkway to our left, the Potomac River to the right. My lights are nearly dead, and I’m navigating by the yellow dotted line that divides the trail, four or five dashes at a time. The willows along the shore are stripped to the bare tendrils of branches. I look over my shoulder to find his light behind me. We approach the city, cross a bridge, take the road around the back end of the Lincoln Memorial, then around to the front. He rides ahead. I slow at the plaza before the marble steps to watch the cameras flash in the dimmed chamber.

In the last week of the year, I go running on a path alongside an airfield in Colorado. Early in the morning, the fighter jets pivot and take off. I turn at the mile marker and jog back toward the mountains.

On the last night of the year, I’m back in a city, again with the boy. Now drunk in a series of places: rooftop bars under heatlamps, emptyish dance floors. There are brief walks skittering in heels on sidewalks. And there is this boy, standing against a wall with his eyes half-closed. I walk over and touch his jaw. The year ends and we endure six hours into the next. Taxi cab back to the parked car in the suburbs, a return drive into the city when nearly everything is gated shut, a filthy McDonald’s, egg sandwiches unwrapped in bed.

This year will not be easy. I want to stay out late in bars, memories unraveling without nostalgia. I want to fall asleep, exhausted and safe beside him, and wake up on cold mornings with days ahead like promises. There will not be time for all this.

At the top of the stairs, there is a window. Outside, in the evening, tree limbs black on a blue-black sky. I climb the stairs in the dim light from the kitchen, watching the window, watching the trees. He follows, flicks on the hall light, and the window becomes a mirror.

All of October was like this, momentarily beautiful and then lost, all that time at my desk, at my computer, in a lecture hall without windows at all. The fall has been microbiology, all the bacteria that breach your cells, the viruses that drift into your lungs, proteins that lock and unfold and allow the lipid membrane to part. The parasites. The trematodes that pair off in a dark turn of your gut, curl around each other, and mate for life– there with your fluid washing around them and your blood vessels branching in the walls.

And your heartbeat in a chamber somewhere above, speeding up a little as you ascend the stairs and turn toward the bedroom.

Less than a mile from the district line, Michigan Avenue lifts into a bridge. I’m on my toes now, running in the sunlight on the narrow sidewalk that slopes upward alongside the concrete barrier. There’s an ugly little tangle of asphalt below, low brick buildings with awnings, the kinds of places where they hammer the dents out of car doors. Ahead, the dome of the basilica. A seminarian passes on the other side of the sidewalk, head down, black cassock fluttering around his ankles, back backpack.

I’m still some six miles from the Lincoln Memorial. Here’s the children’s hospital, my old neighborhood, protestors, blocks of office workers walking out into the autumn afternoon. Tourists descending into the hillside of the Vietnam wall. When I get to the end of the emptied-out Reflecting Pool, I’ll stop. I’ll climb the steps to stand beside a stranger and read the second inaugural carved into the wall of the north chamber.

Sunday night, I’m on the Metro, wearing a skirt and studying flashcards in my lap. Up out of the city and into the open air: the moon is low and orange and half-eroded. I get out at the suburban stop, and the train accelerates away above empty backyards. I walk alone from the station, through the neighborhood, all the time listening to the sort of music that’ll make you sad even if you weren’t before. Here, at nearly ten o’clock at night, the trees sound like sighing and everything seems a little lonely. A man stands in an open garage that’s lit white, packed with machinery and a vintage car. Someone runs a leaf blower in the dark. I stop under a streetlamp to write something down, hit the back button to repeat a song.

Most things are not dangerous, anymore. The Appalachians were once the highest mountains in the world, the jagged seam between this continent and Africa. Now they are rounded, forested: after the rain, you hike through afternoon light all watery and green. In the evening, you pitch a tent on soft ground, hunt for wood in the near-dark, drink whisky beside a fire, beside a stream. Touch his shoulder before sleeping, find it again in the morning. The car is parked at the trailhead, and you reach it just before the next rainstorm. You take the passenger seat, wipe the fogged windshield, watch the wisps of clouds spiral up against the slopes; there’s coffee in the cupholders, seatbelts, indicators, the engine hum.

But there are other things. Tuesday morning at the train stop, he parks in the post office lot beside the rails, you check the time, you shoulder your bags. He gets out to say goodbye and says something else instead, just as you’re turning away. You keep going, you’ll be undone by all this otherwise, cross the tracks to the northbound side. The summer’s dissolving into thunderstorms. You’re uncertain your luck will hold.

The backyard is full of trees just now yellowing, and the trees are full of cicadas with abdomens like drums– and even in the morning, in August, the cicadas sing.

In June, there was the precipice.

August began with waiting, and then unfurled. One day I was in the old world, walking the yellow bridge, eating stone fruit at the water’s edge, carrying ivory train tickets tucked inside my notebook. Five days later, I was napping in an airport parking lot with my cellphone on vibrate and tucked under my leg, waiting for his call.

I am only half alone, suddenly. On these quieter nights, I am up late slicing hard boiled eggs into a potato salad, or reading long poems before stretching out across my bed in the heat, before falling asleep to the ceiling fan’s chain clinking against the extinguished bulb.

We ate breakfast early, sharing a plate of salted cucumber and cheese and an egg that Andras boiled while I packed my bag. He asked me to read his favorite Graham Greene novel, and I promised, and he asked me to return, and I promised to try.

But you may be in Israel by then, Andras.

Then you will go there.

He carried my bag to the trolley stop and kissed me twice before I boarded.

All day, I traveled west: through rainstorms in Austria; through Germany, where the sky was filled with clouds towering and shifting and not quite real. Into France’s pastureland. The trains all running late, close connections in the huge open halls of railway platforms. It was dark again by the time I walked up out of the Gare de l’Est and into the heat.

Today was like autumn, Andras said, cool and dark and damp. We took the old metro through the city, standing together by the doors, speaking above the noise of the rattling carriage. In the synagogue, I looked up through the blue stained glass and looked out into the burial garden, and Andras talked about what happened to his sisters during the war. When we were finished, we returned to the apartment and stood against the kitchen counter and drank apricot brandy. It was barely lunchtime. I heated food on the porcelain stove, fumbling with the aluminum pots and the lighter and gas knobs.

At the basilica, in the evening, I knelt on the tiles and halfway listened to the familiar cadences and unfamiliar language of the Mass. After, I walked. Budapest could not help but be beautiful tonight: the unexpected cold, the broken indigo clouds, the bridges and palaces orange-gold under lights. I probably don’t believe in God, but I believe in gratitude. So I sat on the crumbling steps leading down to the Danube and listened to the black water moving and tried to give thanks.