“And though you were grown up by then, you felt as lost as a child. And though your pride was broken, you felt as vast as your love for her. She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you’d grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence. “For a long time, it remained hollow. Years, maybe. And when at last it was filled again,

I did it for myself alone, not for anyone else, and that was the difference. It didn’t matter if I found the words, and more than that, I knew it would be impossible to find the right ones. And because I accepted that what I’d once believed was possible was in fact impossible, and because I knew I would never show a word of it to anyone, I wrote a

As the rifles were pointed at his chest he wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard.

There are so many ways to be alive, but only one way to be dead.

I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely.

He had no idea it would be the last. He thought everything was just beginning.

Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together.

I imagined all the ways I could go. Blood clot to the brain. Infarction. Thrombosis. Pneumonia. Grand mal obstruction to the vena cava. I saw myself foaming at the mouth, writhing on the floor. I’d wake up in the night, gripping my throat. And yet. No matter how often I imagined the possible failure of my organs, I found the consequence

The moment had passed, the door between the lives we could have led and the lives we led had shut in our faces. Or better to say, in my face. Grammar of my life: as a rule of thumb, wherever there appears a plural, correct for singular. Should I ever let slip a royal We, put me out of my misery with a swift blow to the head.