The catalyst for writing this came from a diagnosis of stage four terminal Leukemia in 2015. I’m only alive to tell this story because a stranger 4,000 miles away generously gave me his stem cells, and my partner became my caregiver. Then, a year after I'd gotten out of a locked psych ward where she left me with acute depression and never returned, I was able to think and write again and began pulling together pieces of memories. That’s the kind of thing you do in a memoir of course, but you try to keep it focused on a specific event or time. The trouble was, the more I wrote, the short version required more background to make sense. As it grew, recreating a scene opened a small window and I looked in, sometimes reluctantly, and got pulled through, like Alice through the looking glass. Each time it happened, there was a lot going on: long-forgotten conversations, people, and meetings came alive and demanded my attention. When ...