Approaching now, the hum beneath the calendar, a low wire singing in the floor of the year. I press my ear to Tuesday and hear it— the drone of a decade still forming, its pitch like a coin dropped down a well that has yet to strike water. I have always been able to hear forward. The way heat ticks in pipes before dawn, the way a house settles toward its eventual collapse. The future has a sound. I am telling you. A specific resonance, mineral and clean, like glass being cut in another room. I was twelve when I first caught it—a whine behind the weather report, thin as a filament, and I followed it for years. Now I wake and the morning carries a particular chord, lower than speech, a vibration I feel in my teeth. Whole cities approach me as frequencies I cannot name. They arrive the way thunder arrives: the sound precedes the thing. I charted what I could. Small predictions: a letter, a phone call, the exact hour a woman would leave. Then larger ones—the static before markets fell, that electric whir before the towers. I wanted silence. I drove into the desert. Still it came: the tone of the day after tomorrow, insistent, a single sustained note rising from beneath the sand. There is no deafness deep enough. The years keep sounding ahead of themselves, and I keep hearing what the world has decided to become before it arrives, before it knows its own full and terrible name.

I burned the way a match burns, all the way down to the fingers. There was a summer I carried light in my chest like a swallowed coin, and you were there, radiant with the particular fever of being young. We stood in the parking lot at dusk, our shadows long as declarations. I remember the heat off the asphalt, how it made the air visible, trembling. We thought we were infinite. The night disagreed. I have kept the photographs where our faces are overexposed, white flares where eyes should be, proof that we looked directly at joy. The sprinklers came on. We ran through them anyway. Water on bare skin, the shock a kind of baptism we invented for ourselves. I think brightness is a unit of measure no instrument records. It lives in the body, then leaves. A filament thins. Goes dark. You drove away in October. Leaves the color of a wound healing. I stood on the lawn and watched the taillights shrink to red periods. Two dots. Then the road swallowed everything. Now I carry the afterimage, that green ghost the retina makes when the source is gone. I press my palms against my eyelids and see us still, faintly, the way a bulb remembers burning for one full second after the current stops.