I wish you all a long and happy life

The shadow of years was not as big on his small body. He knew I was away . But when people left they always came back.

And there she was, alone and walking out in the cornfield while everyone else I cared for sat together in one room. She would always feel me and think of me. I could see that, but there was no longer anything I could do. Ruth had been a girl haunted and now she would be a woman haunted. First by accident and now by choice. All of it, the story of my life and death, was hers if she chose tot ell it, even to one person at a time.

How could it be that you could love someone so much and keep it secret from yourself as you woke daily so far from home?

He had a moment of clarity about how life should be lived: not as a child or as a woman. They were the two worst things to be.

Tess was my first experience of a woman who had inhabited her weirdness, moved into the areas of herself that made her distinct from those around her, and learned how to display them proudly.

Life is a perpetual yesterday for us.