Lesley Nneka Arimah is the kind of writer that doesn’t mind holding your hand. When you open her work, she will gladly offer her palm, you will gladly take it, and the both of you will (gladly) walk down a familiar street, in a familiar town, on a familiar day. Only when you’re a quarter-mile into this walk and have reached a busy intersection will you look around and notice that something’s . . . off.

Perhaps, Mithra seems to be suggesting, it’s not so much the veracity of a notion that matters, but instead the weight it comes to bear in the world.

When you finally reopen your eyes, the strobe lights have been replaced by soft overhead lighting and a maelstrom whirls on the dance floor – faces suspended in expressions of exhilaration that will only last until the bar closes. You see a familiar form moving among them. You let that thought go, sure it is a negroni-induced mirage. But you notice the way it taps its foot against the floor. Slowly. Out of time with the music.

While I was flippantly making a teenage judgment about bodies and youth with a larger acknowledgement of mortality and the inability to stop time, I was also expressing a palpable loneliness.