I would do exactly what you are doing: I would talk to everyone I needed to, I would not tell too many people his name. When I was sure," she said, "I would find a quiet way, and I would kill him.

But also I wanted him to go away and leave me be. I was granted one weak grace. Back in the room where the green chair was still warm from his body, I blew that lonely, flickering candle out

These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.

I'm fine with whatever comes my way, and whatever doesn't come my way I'm fine with too. I have a very laissez-faire attitude with the whole thing.

Our only kiss was like an accident- a beautiful gasoline rainbow.

You look invincible,' my mother said one night. I loved these times, when we seemed to feel the same thing. I turned to her, wrapped in my thin gown, and said: I am.

Heaven is comfort, but it's still not living.