I’ll start this in Sheetz. It’s not where this starts, but it’s a place I can manage. I was ordering a sandwich around midnight, feeling frustrated about the things I knew versus what everyone else was telling me. The people in line to pay there, I didn’t want to be around them.

There was a man in a T-shirt and sweatpants. He was talking to another man in hemmed jeans, who was balding with bad skin. His jeans were hemmed because he was a midget. They were talking baseball and I tried not to look.

A kid in a flat-billed cap paid for a pack of smokes and looked over at the two. He called the taller guy coach and the coach asked him how he’d been. Good, he said, real good. The kid looked down at the midget.

“How you been, man,” the kid said. “You still living behind the school there?”

“No,” the midget said. “You must have me confused with someone else.”

The kid apologized, and left, waving to his coach. The short man pushed his money across the counter and said goodnight. I paid, started my car, and drove away through the tunnel and green lights, feeling my own identity unsettled, looking for an absolution from whoever it is I spend my time thinking I might be.

College is a dangerous thing. I think that could also be a beginning. Improving on humanity can be the seeds of something wrong. And that’s why were all here, to feel better, to feel good about ourselves. I’ve felt that—like I’m earning things. And there are things I think I understand better than others. Things I wish I could show them.

Poetry and poetry unfolding into song. There are places. Frozen and blanketed. Pitched roofs and hot water—leafless trees. I’ve breathed in the mornings and slept near candles. And I’ve thought what that might make me.

I think people are—I think I am afraid. I’m scared none of that is real. That all of this is worthless. And it is true all of that, all of what I just talked about, amounts to shit.

I want so desperately for the beauty in this world to have something to do with me. But it doesn’t—it’s there in spite of me. Everyday, it stands as a monument to what I am not, to what we as individuals may never be. Beautiful or right for our own sake, without someone else.

We are a dangerous thing. We are dangerous because we understand so little of the things we love. I drove past the drugstore and hoped I didn’t have to deal with what I had heard back there. I didn’t want to know I really had been thinking like a piece of shit and didn’t deserve a single thing that has come my way.

I had no one to apologize to except for existence itself. I unwrapped my sandwich’s red wrapping and tried to keep the mustard from dripping on my pants. I ate, licking my fingers and realizing how alone I had made myself. I had wanted to be alone and think they couldn’t see what I loved.

But its right in front of us. Watch your hands move sometime. Look at someone blinking. Beauty is just there—it doesn’t need to be figured out.

Everyone in Sheetz knew the same things I knew and were more gracious about it. They bagged sandwiches and counted money, quietly and patiently. Everything is more everything when we let it go. When we hold on, that’s when we find ourselves just squeezing at dung.

I finished my sandwich and crumpled the wrapper in my palm, and I think right there might be the beginning. Right when I start to confuse myself with someone else.