For a bar at midnight on St. Paddy’s Day, the scene is pretty tame. A couple skinny guys in leather jackets circle a pool table near the door, a short row of black tables sit sticky and abandoned behind them, and at the back a short queue of couples wait for drinks. The bartender is grim but friendly, and our discussion over what beer to order is helped along by a slumped leather jacket to my left who mutters angrily about each brew on tap while staring rheumily at his shoes. I order, we sit, and at just the right moment a flimsy basket of tater tots makes its way to the table.

Midnight is about three hours later than I’ve stayed up all month, but I’ve been told I have Irish blood in me, so by the time L turned in at nine staying up was a matter of pride - a kind of solidarity with my people. I wasn’t going to go out and celebrate, mind you, but fail to fall asleep? I had that in me. Three hours later I was still slumped in the big chair upstairs, scrolling, playing it by ear to the tune of Putin propaganda shorts and recently unearthed nuke videos from the 1960s. This kind of browsing doesn’t exactly lull one to sleep, so instead of heading to bed I started texting D links. I sent him a nuke video. He popped online, having just woken up from a nap. I hesitated, realizing that videos of nuclear weapons might be a pretty traumatic thing to wake up to. I sent him another. He took the bait. “Ok. Wait. Fuck this. Let’s get a beer.”

Four hours later the pool game is over, the bar’s getting wiped down, and we’ve asked for the check. As he’s pulling out his credit card, D discovers a scrap of white paper in his wallet and exclaims “oh! I forgot!” before sliding it across the table. “J says hi.” D just got back from a week in Berlin, which is where J is going to medical school. I pull the paper towards me and turn it over. In fact, Berlin is where I last saw J, a little over five years ago. It was a strange moment, a brief hug on the train turnstile after an all-night house party on the outskirts of town. The paper is thin, waxy. I remember sitting on the train, watching the city at sunrise through a thick band of graffiti and feeling enormously sad but not sure why.

Earlier that trip, we had sat in J's parent’s kitchen, drinking tea, listening to her recount how she met her boyfriend in Alaska; how she’d watched him unload fish, shirtless and covered in oil; how she’d swooned a little. I pick up the scrap of paper. It’s small - about the size of a receipt - and across the top JEVER is printed in bold type. The note is short and signed with a scribble. Other memories bubble up. That first brunch, when she and D had their thing. Or going to the life drawing class that she was proctoring on the fourth floor of a building at Columbia. I even remember the long white room and the cluster of old wooden easels that had been pushed back to the windows. Or the email that arrived when L and I were in Quito, just a few days before Thanksgiving. I remember reading about Alaska in a hammock around noon while the hostel’s new puppy nipped at my toes.

I thank D for delivering the note and we get up to go. It’s later than either of us has been awake for months and so at the corner we hug, go our separate ways. When I get back I don’t crawl in to bed but instead go upstairs, back to the computer. After some clicking I find a photo that J left on my iPad after she and her sister stayed in our apartment in New Orleans. I hadn’t actually seen her that time - L and I were on our own trip - which gives the photo a certain dreamlike quality, as if it never happened, or that I was there by just can’t remember.

In it the day looks bright and she’s sitting on our white wooden porch, smiling up at the camera, holding what appears to be lunch. Her feet are bare, her jeans torn, her hair short and neon green. I sit with the photo for a few seconds, thinking a thought too big to think, before closing my laptop and heading downstairs.