Rubber bands. What guides you back to that image, that moment? Is it the rain, this room, the way you wake up slowly to the hum of lawn mowers, or something to do with the season, the smell of lilacs in the air? All of this has happened before.

Conversations move like this, too. You turn the days over, one by one, flipping through the carefully measured months and years in a page-a-day calendar on your desk. The dates change, but not the words. You talk of the same things with the same people, over and over again. 10,000 comments about weather with strangers; 10,000 descriptions of the trees, the light, the taste of apples in October. And now you circle back to your grandparents, and the words circle back to your uncle. Always, the conversation reaches toward the similarities. You don’t remember your uncle anymore, but you have learned to remember him through their memories, their stories, their eyes. They look at you and see pieces of him: Rick ate tofu, too, they say. And fell in love with a penpal. And published things, edited a magazine in college, did we ever tell you that?

You nod, but keep listening, let them talk, let them tell. And secretly, inside, you are considering other things—the things they don’t say, the stories they don’t tell. You mentally add them to the conversation, tacking the unspoken onto the tail-end of everything they say and say again: Rick ate tofu, too. And fell in love with a penpal. And published things, edited a magazine in college, did we ever tell you that? And died of cancer, when he was only four-and-forty.

There is one picture of him left in your memory, from that long-ago winter when you were six. This is before he began to cough, before mothers and aunts began to whisper about him in quiet corners of kitchens crowded with worried eyes. In this memory, you still live in the big white house in Chicago, the one with a creaking swing on the front porch and a flower garden almost as big as the small yard, swaying and bobbing and full of color (roses, tulips, daisies) each spring. It is not spring yet. Now it is still winter; the windows are shut tight against the snow and your uncle lifts you up with an easy sweep of his still-strong arms and sets you on the dining room table. Other rooms in this house are crowded with the music of laughter: your mother and the aunts, playing endless games of cards, teasing and shrieking and sighing and gold. The game is complicated, fast. You tried watching for awhile, but it made you dizzy. You are too young to learn, and your hands are too small to keep up, so you wandered away—but you have stolen the rubber band that bound their fifty-two cards into a neat little stack. Around and around your hands it goes, weaving between your fingers, stretching and stretching and then snapping back, tighter. And tighter.

This is where your uncle sweeps you up and sets you on the table. Careful, he says, not too tight, you’ll cut off the circulation. You don’t understand what that last word means but the way he says it chills you. Your hand is pale, the fingers hanging limp and heavy from the small stump of wrist. Time and sensation seem frozen there, but only for a moment. Gently, he unwinds the rubber band. The elastic leaves a pattern of red welts on your pale skin. You try to rub them away, but they linger like a warning and fade slowly. (There will be days, years and years later, when you’ll swear that you can still feel the burn of the elastic on your skin, the sudden rush of blood leaping back into your veins, the thud of your heart leaping in your chest.) He says it again, slow: circ-u-la-tion. And now you can feel your pulse pounding in your thumb again and you understand: this is the way things flow, the way things move. He leaves you on the table, your kid-legs swinging in the empty air and about to go numb. He leaves you on the table: hovering.

You’ll hover more in the years that follow, because hovering is easy. Hovering is safe. In Mrs. Johnson’s third grade classroom, you’ll giggle when the girl with the serious eyes and blonde ponytail traces the outline of your body onto a four-foot sheet of mural paper, tickling your ribs with a stub of red crayon. You’ll fill the empty space in the middle with a map of organs and veins, labeling the most important parts of yourself in newly learned cursive letters; and when you’re done, you’ll hang it on the back of your bedroom door until the paper curls and the letters fade. Later, in high school biology, you’ll linger over a textbook diagram of the human heart, imagining the fist-sized knot of muscle beating somewhere beneath your own skin, somewhere inside your own chest. You’ll imagine your blood, flowing out in arteries and traveling back in the veins; and the tidy snap of ventricles and atria like a band of elastic against your wrist. How nice that must be: to always know exactly where you are meant to go.

You are long gone now (and you have never left). Your hands smell of rubber bands and rain. Rain, because it is spring now, and that is what the world does in spring; rubber bands, because you remember, because the rain and the weather pull gently at the elastic inside your chest, and this is the way a life is made: everything inside you springs out…and falls back. Somewhere you are still six. Somewhere you are four-and-forty. And when the aunts make room for you at the table where the cards fly, yours is the empty chair where your uncle once sat. Yours are the hands that now shut the windows against the snow.