What are the rules of attraction?

Sometimes it’s the barely visible scar on your nose from the time we broke into the motel pool in Occidental on my 30th birthday, three of us content in the shallows, you getting fancy with a dive from the treed-out darkness—and when you emerged from under the blue plastic pool cover you’d somehow skinned just the top of your nose without taking out all of your teeth, a miracle considering that earlier in the evening there’d already been a fractured jaw—a true accident unforeseen by the off-duty EMT and the tailgate that caused it—but of course we didn’t know the damage then and there was still a half case of wine and a handful of firecrackers and the motel parking lot as good a place as any to fall on your face and dust it off.

The casualties in those days both great and small but never boring.