Severance: A Novel

Let us return, then, as we do in times of grief, for the sake of pleasure but mostly for the need for relief, to art.

It is a primitive darkness. It has always been here, after all the city lights have gone out, carrying its own time with the sun.

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.

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?

There is mystery to how faith takes root and flourishes, how need transforms into belief.

It made me wistful for the illusion of New York more than for its actuality, after having lived there for five years.

To live in a city is to live the life that it was built for, to adapt to its schedule and rhythms, to move within the transit layout made for you

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.