When you’re little, she faxes, sadness is a kid you can kick out of your game. A simple, fast-food feeling that leaves as soon as the bully is gone. Deeper sadnesses get buried into one’s coastal shelf, accessible only by your adult version.

Hard butter tears the bread.

Adina realizes friendships are reincarnations. Everyone reminds her of someone she knew. Was the world on a twenty-year loop or did the human mind only have the capacity to make a finite amount of correspondences?

Human life is quick. I do not mean: Life is short. I mean: The reason we feel like certain significant days happened only yesterday is because they did. Many of us have bodies that age preposterously out of proportion with how young we are. It’s like aging in theater time. We’re all seven-year-olds hired to play the parts of adults. A decade is not

Wine! It’s the worst! Wine is a liquid people pathologize in the way they talk about it, sell it, in the vessels they put it in. Red wine tastes like a dark-walled library and white wine smells like a woman looking away. IF IT’S TERRIBLE, WHY DO HUMANS DRINK IT? Because, like many things humans enjoy, it frees them from their bodies. Other examples

They cannot afford to be smart with money.

There is nothing uglier than sin. Sin: Dirt on your mind’s floor you must always be sweeping.

The Science teacher appears to remember that city kids are wary of anyone asking them to believe things they can’t see.

Everyone’s eyes are caught so Adina looks at herself in the mirror, expecting to see a goddess emanating a buttery glow. Instead, she sees a petite woman in a half-top lunging politely. Hair frizzed above her head like a disoriented halo. Unattractive redness blooms through her cheeks and neck.