My father has a gun safe in the back room, a giant, hulking thing of black steel that sucks the heat from the room into its unlocked depths like a singularity and there’s a reason why I don’t practice my Second Amendment rights that has nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with pacifism, nothing to do with any misguided sense of honor and justice, but it probably does have something to do with why I lean against the safe at three in the afternoon, why I drive down County Road 150 on muscle memory with my eyes closed, why I stand too close to the edge of cliffs and imagine what it would be like to fall, and all I know is that my body is in the South and my divided heart is up North and my grandmother is lying on a table ten miles away with formaldehyde running through her veins and I can’t fathom what the right thing to say would be but it’s not “I love you,” not “I’m here for you,” not lines about a grocery store read to me on a quiet evening by a man who doesn’t want me or the way it feels to delete a number from my phone and still long to call it and then calling my therapist instead, trying to speak quietly so my mother doesn’t hear because she doesn’t believe in therapy and I don’t believe in anything anymore, not since they dug a hole for my aunt in the same graveyard that both my grandmothers will soon inhabit, the one with a plot already bought for me “just in case I need it” and the safe is cold against my back. I won’t open it, but I could. That’s enough.