This is one of my favorite pieces you have written. It’s beautiful and literary in form. It also contains a journalistic component, in leading the reader to a county seldom heard from. That is, the sense of a male human looking back at his life to see how he engaged with the brutalities built into boyhood. There are brutalities built into girlhood, too, and for some girls, there’s as much physical violence and the threat of violence as looms over the lives of the boys here. For me, this piece offers a window into the persistence for males of having to situate themselves in one potentially violent encounter or another—as a way of ordinary life. I find so interesting as well the way your narrator (aka you) does not run away from the dangerous types he meets nor become one of them but cagily becomes their comrade, with his own sense of wariness. That is also what women often find themselves doing to move through time and space in one piece. I love the man you became, and I love the writer that man is.