Severance: A Novel

To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?

The only way to metabolize anger is to direct your focus to things at hand. Like my breath, which comes out in fogs. Like the whirring of the space heater, its thin heat disappearing out the cell as soon as it is made.

The first place you live alone, away from your family, he said, is the first place you become a person, the first place you become yourself.

I have always lived in the myth of New York more than in its reality. It is what enabled me to live there for so long, loving the idea of something more than the thing itself. But toward the end, in those weeks of walking and taking pictures, I came to know and love the thing itself. This was partly because I loved the work of documenting it. Even

To despise someone is intimate by default.