Introduction

I first came to the word visitation while on a hike with friends in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, exchanging half smiles with the other leaf peepers we passed, not yet aware that we were lost. I was listing the things that haunted my writing — God, ghosts, prisons, childhood — and trying to find the unifying principle. Amid the brief and staggering beauty of autumn, we landed on the idea of visitation: impermanence, ephemera, an encounter, a thing made more beautiful by the knowledge that it will end. 

At that time, I was living a visitor’s life. I’d been in the Midwest for half a decade, spending three years in one place, two years in another, preparing to move again. I owned no furniture, too many clothes, too many books. Living in a place I knew I’d leave, I felt temporary, and I felt people treat me as such. Every experience was weighty and weightless at once.