I arrived at Night Drawer drawing club three or so weeks ago—five minutes after Olive broke up with me on the phone and a few days into my prostate gone tender and painful and making my feet tingle and terrifying, yet another forced search for new housing heavy on my mind—to find the prompt that evening was “Smiling through it all.”

I was not in shock, or else something was alive and engaged and warm and plainly not traumatized inside of it, undiminished. The early passage of equanimity was no less honest than the stabbing heart-and-crotch pain a couple mornings after and the quieter lovelorn-and-perineal malaise two weeks hence.

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