She resolved everything into simplicity. Her sisters picked up and put down hobbies like animals examining scents. She never understood that. Interest to her presented as heat, the kind that boxes in sight, narrows towards a single point of light. Full-body undertakings. And during spells of outside chaos, when things showed themselves to be adhered only in order to fall apart—the nature of things, in other words, opening up—she could turn to her interest and fold herself into it. There she found solidity in the specific, where one thing leads to another until she might wind up, say, memorizing a band’s discography and buying out their merch and planning her year around their tour dates. After her father’s diagnosis, she caught the lead singer leaving a venue one February night in Philadelphia, handed him a sharpie, and asked him to draw her a doodle, any doodle. He gave her a look and then drew a ghost in a few looping scribbles on her forearm. The line forming the mouth wasn’t quite a smile, wasn’t exactly a frown. The following morning she was outside the tattoo parlor when it opened, her first and last time. She told them to trace it over. After her father died, after he did his best to drag them down with him (because it was not fair, he did not want to act like it was fair), she spent ten times what it cost to put it on, taking it off over three sessions at the laser removal clinic. Hour by hour the pain radiated up her arm, through her bones, into the marrow where the songs had crept and coagulated—track after track on replay, headphones on high in hospital waiting rooms—and broke them down one by one. A full-body undertaking. Last I checked, her latest obsession was pain.