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In the game of Go, the board is made of nineteen intersecting vertical and horizontal lines; white stones; black stones; and time. Go is known as the game of surrounding. The aim is not simply to defeat your opponent or gain territory, but to hold territory securely. This question—what must we accept and what must we release in order to hold something securely?—is asked by the game of Go. To love someone who is gone—what is the word for this? The past tense, loved, does not suffice. The words mourn and grieve touch only the outline of this feeling. Everything that passes through this world is tethered to things invisible to our senses. What is visible to my eyes is so tiny, like a flower tumbling loose from history. The poet Du Fu, who lived more than twelve hundred years ago, played Go on a sheet of paper on which his wife had carefully drawn the grid. When I think of all the summers that lit the world before I was born and all the summers that will arrive when I am gone, I feel vertigo. The game of Go happens stone by stone. Sequence gives rise to dimension and dimensions are encircled by sequence. We are surrounding one another in life and in death. Time changes the space between us in ways that tumble loose from the words distance and nearness. Your parents, too, were told to pack enough for a few days and begin walking because bombs were coming. They, too, were told that this exile was only temporary. I miss you even when you are near. I was always the forgetful one and you were memory. The word delta derives from the Phoenician word for the door of a tent, daleth, and in mathematics, delta Δ denotes a changeable quantity. You and I last met at the delta where inner and outer touch and diverge. The game of Go is full of suppositions on the strengths and weaknesses of ourselves and others. The board can only contain suppositions because time continuously alters the way the stones stand in relation to one another. If a player attempts to make their suppositions certain by increasing their hold on territory they occupy, the value of their territory will decrease. This need for certainty, which reveals a weakness, will be tallied in the final scoring of the game. Go is full of such switchbacks. You wept when I wept. Outside my fourth floor apartment is a skateboard park. Now and then, when I think of you and turn my head, I see a teenager leaping between the trees. There are 86 billion neurons in the human brain. Some 403 quintillion bytes of data are created on this earth every single day. I found an old answering machine tape and heard my mother’s voice for the first time in twenty-four years. I love you, I said, in the last moments of your life. The dead remain but the living depart. Praying, we walked clockwise around the sacred object. Who surrounds the surrounding one? The shape of each tree holds a record of the wind.

Madeleine Thien is the author of five books, most recently Dogs at the Perimeter (2011), Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016), and The Book of Records (2025). Do Not Say We Have Nothing was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and the Folio Prize, and won the Governor-General’s Literary Award for Fiction. Her books have been translated into twenty-five languages, and her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. Born in Vancouver, Madeleine lives in Montreal.