Sharif will see that his life has been a series of grief cycles, mourning some loss or another, most of them small. But near the end of this cycle, he will be transported by a heightened openness. It will bring him to the limits of himself, to a kind of disappearing point. From there, he'll feel how the walls of his isolation are pressed against an

Sharif will be frightened by how little he knows the people he knows best. Despite knowing how they'd behave and what they'd say in most situations, there will hardly be any sense of their inward experience. He won't feel seen in this way by them either. The walls of himself will isolate him almost entirely. And even within his own borders, it will

The couple's negative power source will start burning out. They'll lose the shielding torque of pessimism and feel more threatened by the external environment. A to-do list or an inane conversation or a politician's face will push their bodies into the blind anxiety of survival mode. They will start turning against thinking itself, the volatility a

They had discussed the sacredness of stares before. They're the brain's sensory deprivation tank, she'd said; an enclosed, restorative, floating paralysis that should be as uninterruptible and respected as prayer. When Adjoua stared at something long enough for it to start moving—the brick wall, the swirl of grain in the wooden floors, the uneven c

Sharif laughed as he wrestle-hugged his bear. He then flipped Judy on his back and played his belly like a bongo drum. Judy's tail thumped the ground repeatedly. One of the great things about Judy was how he let Sharif exorcise complex emotions on him in ways that were unacceptable between humans: rough touch, hard body patting, schnoz-blows, surpr

The intensity of reality was somehow distancing him from reality. He looked up at the sky, hoping to ground himself.