We were always getting away with something, which implied that someone was always watching us, which meant we were not alone in this world.

I was experiencing a paroxysm of selfhood.

Everything we had thought of as The World was actually the result of someone’s job.

We had loved people we really shouldn’t have loved and then married other people in order to forget our impossible loves, or we had once called out hello into the cauldron of the world and then run away before anyone could respond.

Inelegantly and without my consent, time passed.

The dark shape wept in the incredibly sad way that only air can cry,

And I could not make a move without making love. Every time I shifted in my chair, lifted my fork, brushed my hair from my eyes, I seemed to be pushing through the motions as through honey, slowly and with all kinds of implications.

I told myself that the sound of my breathing was really the sound of all the animals in the world breathing, even the humans, even the boy, even his dog, all together, all breathing, all on Earth, at night.

It was a tragic romance. Maxamillion was an old man who falls in love with a child and waits for her to grow up, only to die of old age on her eighteenth birthday.