We hit the sidewalk, and dropped hands. How I wished, right then, that the whole world was a street.

My eyelids are my own private cave, he murmured. That I can go to anytime I want.

While she cut the mushrooms, she cried more than she had at the grave, the most so far, because she found the saddest thing of all to be the simple truth of her capacity to move on.

But the sky is interesting, it changes all the time.

...a Dorito asks nothing of you, which is its great gift. It only asks that you are not there.

I don't think so, I don't agree. The most unbearable thing I think by far, she said, is hope.

I am the drying meadow; you the unspoken apology; he is the fluctuating distance between mother and son; she is the first gesture that creates a quiet that is full enough to make the baby sleep. My genes, my love, are rubber bands and rope; make yourself a structure you can live inside. Amen.