We were born 35 years and 500 miles apart, though that distance feels shorter somehow. Your path was cemented and dried before mine was even conceived of. I like to think that in a parallel universe, where fate is not so exacting, where time heals instead of corroding, they intersected.

Hannah Smart is a fiction writer and literary/pop culture critic. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming in The Harvard Advocate, The Boston Globe, Puerto del Sol, The Rupture, SmokeLong Quarterly, and The Sunlight Press, among others. She is the founder and editor in chief of experimental magazine The Militant Grammarian, holds an MFA from Emerson College, and is a Ph.D. candidate and writing professor at the University of Southern Mississippi.