I could feel us attaching and knew that any chance of breaking apart from him emotionally was not possible. I was his now.

But now at thirty-eight, my time was beginning to run out. I still didn’t want a child. I didn’t know what I would do with a child if I had one. But I missed having that open space before me in which to decide.

Why was I so susceptible to flights of fancy, my perception of other people’s views of me?

The only way to maybe have satisfaction would be to accept the nothingness and not try to put anyone else in it.

This was just what people did now. We went from emotion to phone. This was how you didn’t die in the twenty-first century.

I was not trying to kill myself so much as vanish. I just wanted to go to sleep and be transported into the ether, another world. I guess that vanishing would have meant death, so perhaps it was an attempt at suicide? But I felt afraid of death, or at least, afraid of dying. Was there something that wasn’t death but wasn’t here either?

Yes, it certainly seemed like the human instinct, to get high on someone else, an external entity who could make life more exciting and relieve you of your own self, your own life, even for just a moment.

One minute you were playfully complaining to friends about a man’s farts and the next minute you would kill to have the farts back.

This is why the Greeks needed myth: for that boundary, to know where they stood amidst the infinite. No one can simply coexist with the ocean, storms, the cypress trees. They had to codify the elements with language and greater meaning, and create gods out of them—gods who looked suspiciously like themselves—so that even if they were powerless over