Living beautifully does not protect me from endings; it lets the endings glow from within like lanterns. It does not decorate the world; it discovers the world undecorated and calls it enough.

If I can let a minute pass through me without trying to improve it, the minute becomes interesting on its own, like a shy child that will only speak when you stop asking questions.

There is a river through the city no one photographs, a river no one cares about. It is a strip of water too honest for postcards. I take it as my teacher. The river is a champion of mixed metaphors: the glitter of oil, a shopping cart tenderly rusting into coral, a heron like a thought that decided to happen later. I walk beside it until the day’s... See more

e don’t try to be important. We try not to become scenery to each other. Once a month we do a civic tenderness: we return a rogue shopping cart to a corral, sweep a stoop that isn’t ours, carry a stranger’s catastrophe for twelve minutes and set it down without advice. I am a liar. I don’t have any friends. But I like to believe I have and,... See more

Death starts visiting like a polite accountant. We talk monthly. I write a two-sentence obituary for myself with no achievements in it; I throw out a box of things that were supposed to prove I had lived: lanyards, plastic, a faded wristband that believed in me for forty-eight hours. I clean a drawer with the calm of someone who knows the coroner... See more