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When I was 18, I began keeping a list of people I had lost to the war. Which war? It is all the same, with different faces, different frontlines. There are two sides to every conflict, say the Americans, and I agree. It’s people who want to live versus people who want to kill them.

My first love, then more. Friends, colleagues. Godfather, uncle, lost to stress, far from the front. My grandparents, all of them, of course. Acquaintances, people I’d met once at parties, on trains, at the in-between places. Children of the crossroads. None of us were that important. In America, this is called “collateral damage”.

Then I began to mourn the days that did not happen. Communions, weddings, funerals. Saying goodbye in a normal way. Sunset, sunrise, calendar after calendar lost in the strikes. Family dinner. My old friends from Hollywood thought I should stop watching the news. So stressful. Plus, it’s not like you can do anything.

Girls my age and younger, much younger. In fatigues, in gauze. Wearing boots how the Hollywood girls would wear to their back alley punk shows except back home, the girls are wearing them for battle. For the same war that took my first love and virginity and everybody else. Beautiful girls, so far away from dancing. I will receive my draft card before my passport. That’s how it works.

Here is my math: four years, but really ten, honestly twelve, or twenty if we count that, and we should, that was more dead, after all, and then there was the nineties, then the century before that, then the old war that didn’t ever stop, all the way back to two men standing in a forest not yet ringed with screams. They stand on land not yet soaked in the blood of running children, the dirt not yet bludgeoned into a mass grave. They breathe cool air. It smells like linden blossoms, black currant, fresh hay.

It is morning. One man wants to live. The other disagrees. It is around 880 years after the birth of Christ. Nice Jewish boy.

Because of this— the forest, the two men, that long argument— I was born in Los Angeles. I learned to count on my fingers. I learned to count very early, very young.

The crossroads can produce an endless supply of dead children. When you were young, do you remember learning about infinity? It just keeps going. I dare you. I double-dog, triple-dog dare you. I dare you times infinity. You tried to count it a few times, got tired. Like the melody you’d sing on field trips, long drives— this is the song that never ever ends, ever ever ends, ever ever ends, this is a song that never ever ends and it goes like this—

I know a song that does not end. There is a silence that does not come, though the woods are still and dark. My own child, a boy I think he was, or would have been, has gone quiet.

I stopped counting, too.