My sister’s child once asked me to draw the night sky along the length of her forearm. Who is it who gave her the secret passcodes to my soul, the ones I guard with safe distances and copper? And how will she survive this world, her tender heart heavy with a sense of loss she cannot explain?

When I was young, I read so voraciously I knew words I could not correctly pronounce: Hors d’oeuvres. Reticence. Inchoate. Fontanel. Said aloud, my botched vowels, voiced consonants meant for silence, and syllabic stress missteps furrowed adult brows. The voice in my head had its own regional accent. I knew something was wrong, but not how to fix it.

When she was first born, I gravitated toward my niece, the lopsided physics of a tiny body drawing a larger planet into its orbit. I had fled across oceans, so my loneliness at least made sense. The extreme density of her purity pulled me home. My planet cratered by disappointment and cynicism, her toddler body poured itself into every depression. She clung to me like a baby orangutan I once saw in Borneo gripping its mother as they swung from tree to tree, perilous yards above the jungle floor. I was petrified to sense in her a mind and heart akin to mine.

Was she born primed for pain? Was I? I feel the acid rain eating into wet leaves. The brutal, bloody death by unsuccessful childbirth of a woman in India a century ago. The wailing strings of a requiem. A nurse who holds my small, screaming body down for a booster shot. The relentless cutting and scarring of unrequited love. The gradual realization of dual, mutually exclusive forces driving my life: a desperate need to connect versus a yearning for the aliveness I feel primarily when immersed in the new and unknown. Pushed by geography and pulled back by familiarity, like the tide rushing in, then receding, long past the time a rock has been reduced to sand.

I helplessly watched her fall from her bike at age four and begin screaming, a goose egg rising on her forehead despite the protection of a helmet. Was that damage the seed of the depression and anxiety that grip her now? Will a youthful slip from a tree branch that jarred her lumbar handicap her with back pain by thirty? What about each simple request thoughtlessly denied by a harried adult who did not realize her small voice was actually asking: Do you love me? The arguments and eventual divorce of the people who made her? The blue glare of screens, the influence of social media? The sight of a bird’s egg crushed against the sidewalk?

She tells me of the night when she was not yet twelve and she wrapped a belt around her neck, not wanting to die but not wanting to be alive. I do not know when she first picked up a knife and found relief in its sharp edge slicing through her own skin. But I have seen the scarring on her upper thighs. On the soft insides of her arms. I imagine she appreciates the blood rising to the surface and the urgent distraction of wiping it away to allow for the welling up of more deep redness: the color of her heart, and mine.

I, too, have caused her pain. I have left her, again and again, seeking new adventures in faraway places, when I knew she wanted me to stay. I tried to explain. I told her travel was my dream. The first email she ever wrote me, at age nine, was a single run-on sentence: Why do you need to go I thought I was your dream. That line, a permanently searing scar on my heart tissue.

Some things still surprise me now. All these years, I did not know that I did not know the meaning of wainscot, of credenza, fancy words for decorating adult life. I did not know there would be pain far worse than my own hurt. That I would prefer to feel it all again, forever, rather than see her feel it, too. That my deepest self-loathing would rest in the knowledge of having cut her with the blade of being there and then, suddenly, not there.

I did not have a feeling of aging until she defined my oldness. She will not have a sense of her enormous footprint on my heart until she herself is someday blindsided by a youth she can no longer claim. If she lives, that is. I know her despair: It is the black pool in which I always wade, trying to reach the shore while somehow only sinking deeper. Now I know I am not unique. She does not yet have even that solace.

Now fourteen, she rarely reaches for my hand—rarely touches me at all, with perhaps no memory of the visceral, physical bond we once shared. How will we survive this world, our tender hearts tortured by distance? The last time she clung to me like a baby orangutan, I did not know it would be the last time. Did I tell her she was too heavy? Did she beg me to hold on, but I put her down, not understanding the permanence of that one moment of letting go? How can I convince her that I think of her as the stars in each dark night sky I see? Will she grow to understand that even as my heart drives me out into the world and far away from her, she is the reason it beats on?

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