I remember a poster on the wall of my mother’s office when I was growing up. She was a social worker—sometimes a therapist with a private practice, but while I was a child and until I graduated high school, she worked in the Boise schools. At the top of the poster, it said something to the effect of PEOPLE WITH MENTAL ILLNESS ENRICH OUR LIVES. Beneath this profession, names in various fonts of composers, writers, artists, thinkers who had or likely had one or more “severe mental illnesses,” defined on the bottom of the poster as major depressive disorder, schizophrenia, &/or bipolar disorder. I often spent long days in her office alone while she was in meetings and so grew up staring at this poster. Alone with it, I felt in the pit of me a sensation similar to the one I’d felt as a kid in church or when I did something I knew I wasn’t supposed to. Not one of shame or fear but something of the sacred, of magic or mystery. A charge around “mental illness” long before I understood the ways in which this pervaded my family or how its traces were beginning to make themselves known in the chemistry of my developing brain. The hairs on the backs of my legs rose a little as I read the names. I paid attention.

I wrote my first poem when I was 9 or 10—a profession of love to my then boyfriend of almost five years. We’d gotten together in preschool and hadn’t looked back. No one had taught me how to do it or what a poem really was; it just came out of me, fully formed, a pearl in the center of my palm.

With the exception of adolescent diary scrawling about my eating disorder—columns of calorie math in the margins—writing, for the next five or six years after that was a utility not unlike a calculator. I used it when it was called for in school, mostly in accelerated English class. I was smart by then, or someone had decided it was so. After spending early childhood with my self-determined betrothed (we got married under the lilac arch around age five) at an experimental preschool called The Children’s School, where we were taught to use our words and sort out any issues under the shade of the Conflict Tree, I’d fallen into a kind of academic depression. One abrasive first grade teacher and a series of extracurricular recognitions of mortality and I’d curled inward, didn’t reemerge until fourth grade when Ms. Kent, a vivacious and energetic teacher whose obsession with Australia heavily influenced our learning environment, saw me squinting from the back row and recommended that I go to the eye doctor. Not long after getting glasses, “they” realized I was “smart” and plopped me in a weekly gifted program where I was free to explore my curiosities, which then included Shakespeare and the Globe Theater, Antonio Stradivari, Sarah Winchester’s house, and Watergate.

Thanksgiving break of my junior year of high school, I had my wisdom teeth removed. I took my Vicodin as prescribed until I stopped needing it. The opioid crisis not yet legible, my parents were no more concerned about my hydrocodone prescription than they would have been about a round of antibiotics. I kept what pills were left in the bathroom cupboard, or I hid them in a shoebox with artifacts from parties my parents didn’t know I went to and letters from my long lost first love.

One night, I cut a pill in half and took it. At first, my skin felt itchy and too small for me, my insides hot and melty. Soon enough, though, my brain opened up, expanded and unfurled into pillowy clouds, like food coloring dropped in a glass of water, and I wrote. Sentences streamed out of me one after another, each pulling the next forward, a chain of color linked together impossibly, invisibly.

I didn’t do it much—halved the two or three I’d kept, took them nights after my parents went to bed, the stars on my teenage duvet cover pulsing, pushing themselves into the air from its surface—and once the pills were gone, I didn’t try to find more. An early example of survival that I would not come to understand until many years later when others with similar experiences started to die. The difference between recreation and addiction, fun and undoing, experiment and death: one degree of brain chemistry, a slightly stronger connection to family, a few more tools, a slightly longer delay between access and action. But what I had found there stayed—the writing—an engagement with language not about language but about bringing what was once inside and formless out into a mysterious yet material shape. An expulsion of feeling I hadn’t known was possible, pure and whole and all at once, one that I would come to need more and more urgently.

Somewhere around the time I first encountered opiates, I met Michael. Archangel Michael with a tattoo on his forearm about Truth with a capital T. I had a year left of high school and he was a year out, shared an apartment with a friend not far from the preschool where I learned to use my words. Where I learned to love boys and girls and reading. Michael was beautiful—tall, handsome face, a head of dark, curly hair, perpetually tan and a little dirty, a thinker, a talker, one of the mad ones—my Platonic form of Bohemian intellectual. He smoked cigarettes and drank yerba mate from a gourd and he was the most alive person I’d ever met.

I remember the first time we went to coffee watching him refuse cream then sprinkle drops of cold water into the cup so that he could drink it faster. And that was how he was—he wanted everything all at once, as immediate and undiluted as possible. Michael made cigarettes look cool and read thick books, but he didn’t care about academia or achievement. Though there is no question that I was in love with him, I was also a little afraid of him and we only kissed once. He tasted like coffee and tobacco and Nag Champa. Knowing Michael blew open my understanding of what my life could look like—so outside of what I’d been taught it should—and he was the first person I ever met who was proud of writing poems.

After two depressed years of college in Eugene, my years-long eating disorder and the study of Western Philosophy having sent me into an idea- and anemia-induced depression, I returned to Boise and worked at a coffee shop, took easy classes at Boise State to finish my degree, and encountered Michael again. There was a time in Boise at the beginning of the 21st Century and into the early 2010s that I didn’t yet recognize as golden. When we were young and could afford rent with part time jobs. When friends ran businesses and artist spaces downtown and the street kids who loitered outside the coffee shop chose to live the way they did out of desire for their own freedom. Michael was one of them, their leader, really. Still beautiful, still palpably alive. But after not too long, it became clear that his initial aura of contemporary beat poet had morphed into something more extreme. He’d disappear for months on end, hopping trains and doing drugs and falling in love, returning briefly with rapid speech and half a shirt on, his eyes obscured with a thickening glaze, wonder rotted to disillusionment.

Living in Seattle after college, he wrote on my Facebook wall asking for new light. He called me and I could feel him hollowed out, trying to pull something of me and into him. I made an excuse and hung up the phone. Within months, he was gone. Hopped a train south of Portland to get back to Boise so he could see our dying friend before cancer shut off his body. At least that’s what someone told me, though the train he took was headed in the opposite direction. In the middle of the night, Archangel Michael jumped or fell between two train cars, his blood alcohol level .35. Years later, I would write: I guess I never thought of Michael / as having had a problem insomuch as I thought / he was in love with feeling / and not feeling in equal measure. And that was true. And he died of it.

When I was studying poetry in graduate school, I got to know a philosophy student in the master’s program who was married to one of the other poets. In the second year of my MFA, two days after my best friend stopped being alive, the philosopher told me he’d theorized that we were inside a metafiction with me at its center, everyone else minor characters. He said it gave him comfort—took the pressure off—to imagine being a supporting actor in my story. Why me, I asked. Because things happen to you, he replied.

I’ve been asked many times how it’s possible that so many of my friends have died. I have worried something is wrong with me—that maybe I wasn’t close with them at all, am simply hypersensitive, overly reactive to any old death. One answer I’ve found that doesn’t throw my own tenderness under the bus is that when I love I love hard and enduringly and often I love poets. The other answer is longer, shimmering, straddled between this world and the next.