FOR THREE DAYS on the square—it was an image I kept coming back to. I kept returning to the square at night, I kept returning to this beginning of my story that was not a beginning.

It was not my summer. It was not my childhood.

It was a story I told myself, a memory I was preparing for later, one I hoped would give me much joy at some point, and much grief too. It was like the coast when you leave it, the coast seen from the stern of a boat, that last image: a point that recedes until you can no longer see it, until it is one with the horizon, a line drawn between before and after.

I was in the horizon. I was in the sea beneath the sun. I was on the square at night with the low, brown sky.

When I returned to that image, I pictured the uneven colonnade of the palm trees, not from below, but level with the tree crowns, as though I were a giant or a god.