Salinger, I’m sorry, but “Don’t ever tell anybody anything” is a string of words I would like to wrap up in canvas and sink to the bottom of the Hudson, or extract by laser from the ribcage of all of us who ever believed it, who felt afraid to miss someone, to be the last one standing. “Tell everyone everything” is not exactly right, but I do believe that if your mother looks radiant in violet you should tell her, or when a juvenile sparrow thrashes its wings in dustpiles and reminds you of a lover’s eyelashes, you should say so. We are islands all of us, but we are also boats, our secrets flares, pyrotechnic devices by which we signal there’s someone in here we’re still alive! So maybe it’s, “don’t be afraid.” We can rewrite Icarus, flame-resistant feathers, wax that won’t melt, I mean it, I’ll draw up a prototype right now, that burning ball of orange won’t stop us, it’ll be everything we dream the morning after, even if we fall into the sea—we are boats, remember? We are pirates. We move in nautical miles. Each other’s anchors, each other’s buoys, the rocket’s red, already the world entire.