I draw so many iterations of Sandra. But my fear comes through in all of them, and she looks saintly and flattened, leeched of her real self. I draw for days, all through the first two of the four latenights and then at home in the apartment all night, my dad asleep in the living room and my mom gone, the building quiet. I’ve never choked like this before—just had nothing right up against the last minute. It makes the whole world feel slippery and thin in my grasp.

I can’t shake the certainty that I’m a fraud. A lucky fraud, up until now, but luck runs out eventually, and then you have to face yourself.

The night before our last latenight it’s nearly one in the morning and my eyes are burning. I don’t put my pen away yet, though; once I do the accusations on the periphery will come oozing back in. I feel desperate. I draw Mr. X—Mr. X sneering at my lack of talent, Mr. X pleased about my family leaving our neighborhood, Mr. X in the principal’s office telling them he has some information about a student’s fraudulent enrollment that they might like to know. I imagine how he’d look to them, they who don’t know him—a polite neighbor, a clean-cut elderly gentleman. I draw him a mild, deferential I’m-in-public-talking-to-other-white-people expression. And that’s when it happens.

This is what I’ve been doing wrong all along with him, why those drawings never came alive over all these years despite how vivid he’s been in my head: I’ve tried to turn him into a cartoon. I’ve tried to make him look evil. But the real power he has over me is that there was nothing especially extraordinary about him. The worst things you fear aren’t the rare or distant ones. The worst things you fear are the ones so close they take up residence inside your head and whisper to you in the background all the time; the worst things you fear are that there’s so much darkness lurking inside the nicest people and the safest places that you know. I sketch him out (his face is so familiar to me) and I keep the hard anger of his eyes, but this time I make him kinder-looking, his smile genial, and then, only then, does he finally look as menacing as he always has in my mind.

And that’s it. After all this time, after all those moments I was afraid I’d never draw again. When I finally check the time it’s past two o’clock in the morning. My eyes are burning and my hand is cramped. I have to be up in just over two hours.

But this was it. It’s lifted.

I flip to a new page, shapes forming in my mind. And I think of something else then, too, the thing I’ve been trying to draw my whole life: that look on my mom’s face when she told me about my sister. Maybe that’s the reason I could never capture that one, either: because I kept trying so hard to make her look so sad. I missed the other dimensions, the guilt and maybe the hope, too, that it would be better with me, it would be different with me, because after everything, that was the part that crushed me. Those things you want to capture in someone else—the darkest ones hide.

I think about how Sandra was mean sometimes, and funny, the things we used to laugh at together, and then I let myself think about all the horrible things you think about that never go away. I think about her parents and how they have to wake up each day and do crap like—get honked at in traffic, or get guilted for not flossing better at the dentist, and how pointless and enraging it must all feel.

I’ve grown up knowing how when you leave the world—however it happens, however it went with my sister—you take a part of it with you, like when water dries up in a creek for the summer and it’s silent and lonely and parched. This is something I know now that I didn’t then, though: that almost all of us have wanted to leave it before. Maybe you always do when your days feel like one endless night closing in on you and you lose the light, grope around in darkness before it starts to feel easier to just let it swallow you altogether.

But I also know you can try to rope off that idea that somehow you’d be better off gone and set your compass to some shore beyond it. I know it can be done. Since March I’ve seen it more than once. Like how Ahmed’s parents made him go see a counselor and he thought she was a hack, and then he went through three or four others until he finally landed on someone he liked and now he literally lists her number in all his profiles in case anyone else needs it. Or like how Mina Lee started taking antidepressants and it made her feel like herself again. Or how—he told me this a few days after she died—that night I found him outside at Yosemite was one of the times Harry felt that same darkness creeping over him, and plans starting to form. Maybe it takes everything you have, every last atom, to sail past that dark idea, and then on arrival all you have to offer the world is your exhausted, battered self. But that’s everything. You know? It’s enough.

I rub at my eyes with the heel of my hand until they’re dry. I pick my pencil back up.

I don’t have time to draw a portrait made up of all the carefully pieced-together objects I usually do, but somehow it doesn’t feel right this time, anyway. I leave gaps where I can, as much empty space as possible, and draw with spare, quick strokes. And I watch her emerge.

Afterward I feel hollowed out, not tired so much as drained, kind of the way it feels to give blood. I tape the picture to the wall and look at it, trying to imagine what Regina will think of it and whether it’s the kind of statement and impact she wants. I make a few small adjustments, then lie in bed, my whole body aching, and watch the sun come up.

Art doesn’t change the ending. It doesn’t let you lose yourself that way—the opposite, really; it calls you from the darkness, into the glaring, unforgiving light. But at least—this is why it will always feel like a calling to me—it lets you not be so alone.

That’s what I can do here. I can give form and shape to what everyone’s feeling, a picture of her that feels as true as anything else has this past year. Maybe that’s the only way you heal.

Or maybe that isn’t quite true, either—you never quite heal. But at least you get to say you’re sorry.