I used to believe risk would announce itself with fanfare—a cliff edge, a trembling ultimatum, something you could point to as the hinge on which your life turned.

In childhood I imagined risk as a sort of mythic test: a figure standing in the threshold, asking if I was brave enough to continue. I thought it would feel loud. Definite. Something that glowed red at the edges and warned me, Pay attention—this is important.

Last January, I googled couples’ classes NYC, confirmed macarons were gluten-free, and booked me and my wife a chilly, late-night adventure in the East Village.

I was in the kitchen cleaning up after dinner when I heard the glass shatter. I simultaneously took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and waited for the inevitable outburst.

Busted.

We’d just finished brushing our teeth in Todd’s bathroom when he caught me in the mirror. Caught me sneering at the empty Yoo-hoo bottle near the sink, its cheerful yellow label a taunt.

“You don't like anything I like,” he accused me with his toothbrush. “Football. Battlestar Galactica. Yoo-hoo.”

The sun set an hour ago, which means it’s finally below forty degrees Celsius. Normally I embrace the dry heat in Erbil in exchange for the humidity back home in Toronto, but today it leaves my throat dry and hoarse. I shuffle my feet on the dusty tiles outside my house and peer over the metal gate until Emmita’s black SUV pulls up.

He poured his second, maybe third vodka tonic.  He didn’t even look at me as he eased his six-foot-something frame through the sliding glass doors onto our deck. His words grazed by me as he sat down in the folding chair placing his drink on the small table between us, next to his worn copy of Machiavelli’s, The Prince.

I’ve never seen the rooster next door that crows at dawn. And during thunderstorms. And during the ubiquitous fireworks—this is Oaxaca, after all. In the afternoon, when he’s tired of scratching at the same dirt hoping to find something different, but it’s just the same fucking dirt, he crows a little louder.

“I hear you,” I whisper over the fifteen-foot wall that separates us. “I feel you.”

For twelve years, I was an elementary school teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

One hundred eighty school days each year.

Five years teaching kindergarten.

Six years teaching fourth grade.

One year teaching fifth grade.

The simple definition of teacher is one who teaches. But the reality of what it means to be a teacher is so much more.

I love to be as close to people as possible. I guess it’s something about security.

I often wonder at the definition of first love. Many acquaint it to different people, for different reasons. Could I acquaint it to the first crush I ever had? Well then that would have to go to Orlando Bloom as Legolas in The Lord of the Rings. Do I count it as the first heart pounding, late night longing, tear-jerking crush I ever had? Well, that would have to go to a boy named Chase at the tender age of twelve, whom I was infatuated with for quite some time. Though he never liked me back, and while it was fun to crush on and spend nights talking about him with my girlfriends, I don’t think I could call it love. No. My first love belongs to my first boyfriend.

Vinegar-soaked fish and chips in a London pub, our families escaping the summer heat in 2006. You, me, your brother, my sister, all of us in a dark wood booth beside a window. English bric-a-brac, the smell of Guinness. In the spring, we’d both graduated from the University of Oklahoma and turned twenty-two within months of each other, which meant we’d known each other half our lives.

There’s an old Hebrew proverb that says before a child is born, the angel Gabriel whispers the secrets of the world in their ears. He tells them everything about God, life, love, the universe. Then he kisses them on the forehead, the child is born, and they begin to forget all the wisdom that was granted to them.

“Like, would that string really have stayed on her finger for fourteen years?” Lindsey asks, and I laugh in the carefree manner typically brought about by cheap vodka.

“Well, it’s magic string,” I respond, “because it’s infused with love.”

We continue to watch, a bowl of popcorn between us, buzzing on the fruit-flavored Smirnoff I am finally able to buy legally now that I’ve just turned twenty-one. It is summer; the semester has ended; we are each home from college.

When we were young and budding, we smiled as the girl’s body began to change. She was a skinny little thing without an ounce of fat or a wiggle to her bum.

Five years after my dad kicked me out, I was sitting in a swivel chair around a large oval table with ten other students in an Abnormal Child Development class. At twenty-one, I’d found my way into being a graduate student at Bank Street College of Education. Our teacher looked somber as she introduced the evening’s topic. “Tonight, we’ll be talking together about Adverse Childhood Experiences.

“Why are we here?” Karl asks and sinks back into the floral, wing-backed chair. His lower legs jut straight out of the seat.

“To dress Dad’s body for the viewing.”

I see Rob’s family arriving.

Ansel goes on a hunt for funeral home candy. Barely-a-teenager, he returns with slump posture and announces, “No candy!”

“Darn it,” Helena, my cheeky tween says, pretending to be angry. She gauges Ansel’s woeful expression and laughs.

Once, I read a letter I wrote to you out loud in a slam poetry open mic. I wasn’t intending on speaking that day but now that I look back, I probably saw myself in the poets, songwriters, and artists who were barely older than me but just as weary: They’ve spent half their young lives chasing love or at least the thrill of writing about it, and you know me, you’ve always known me. Who am I to deny myself a group like this one?

I have been on many, many dates, including an abundance of first and only dates. I thought I had experienced most first date repertoires—coffee dates and dinner dates, exciting dates and boring dates, dates to the theater and dates to the comedy club, dates that led to relationships and dates that came to screeching halts midway. I’d been on first dates with sixty dollar steaks and first dates with six dollar burgers. I’d been on first dates with lawyers and professors and police officers and firefighters. I’d even been on first dates with married people, unbeknownst to me, of course.

Twenty years ago I was awakened in the middle of the night by a call from my father. My sister Shelley had been hit in a head-on vehicle collision by an elderly man who had driven the wrong way on the interstate for twenty miles. Shelley had been Christmas shopping in Springfield that night and was heading home at the time of the accident. Hazy, I asked my dad, “Did Shelley make it?” The most cavernous “no” I’ll ever hear in my life followed.

When I returned to Tehran for the first time, twenty years after my family’s escape from the Islamic Theocracy, I was in love. I can’t write an exhaustive list of what I was in love with, because I was in love with everything. I was in love with the taxi drivers. The surly ones. The quiet ones. The inquisitive.