We parked and immediately knew we were on the wrong side.

A chain-link fence separated us from the line of people waiting to board the tugboat. On the other side—order, anticipation, evening gowns and tuxedos moving slowly forward. On our side—mud. Thick, dark, recent. The kind that doesn’t forgive a misstep.

I looked at her. She looked at me.

No hesitation.

I slipped off my coat, handed it to her, and lifted her into my arms. She trusted the moment completely. Her arms came around my shoulders as if this was how it was meant to unfold.

I stepped into the mud.

Each step deliberate. The ground pulling slightly at my shoes. The fence just ahead. I found a low place, maneuvered us through, and set her down cleanly on the other side.

When I turned, the line had stopped.

A hundred people watching.

And then—applause.

Not polite. Genuine. Laughter, cheering, a shared recognition of a small act made larger by the moment. I smiled, took her hand, and we stepped into line as if nothing unusual had happened.

Just another day in our world.

What happened on that tugboat wasn’t separate from everything else. It held it.

With Regina, life shifted into a different register. We went to things I wouldn’t have found on my own— theater, dance, music that didn’t resolve the way I expected. I didn’t understand much of it at first.

What I understood was her.

The way she moved through those spaces—listening, watching, without hesitation. She never questioned whether she belonged, and because she didn’t, neither did I.

Something began to change.

Not understanding in any formal way, but a feeling for how it worked. How a moment could hold meaning without explaining itself. How attention changed what you were seeing. How staying with something allowed it to open.

She never said, this is art. She didn’t have to.

She lived inside it.

And slowly, I began to do the same.

I had always made things—drawings, structures, ideas—out of instinct. Now those instincts had a place. What I felt, what I saw, might not be random at all.

There were moments when I would catch myself looking and feel a recognition—not of the thing, but of the act of seeing.

I don’t remember deciding anything.

Somewhere in those two years, moving through that world with her, I began to believe—quietly—that I might be an artist.

And yet, there was something I couldn’t resolve.

Regina moved with a certainty I had never seen. Not confidence—something deeper. As if she understood things it had taken me years just to begin to feel.

I wondered how that was possible.

How someone so young could see with that kind of depth—hold beauty, sadness, attention, control—and move through it without hesitation.

Out on the boat that night, with the river pressing softly against the hull and the storm of the play gathering around us, it felt as if we had stepped inside something already in motion.

And then, somewhere in the back of my mind, something stirred.

Fragments of things she had told me. Moments that hadn’t settled. The sense that parts of her had already been lived through—and let go.