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.

After telling the hard facts to anyone from lover to friend, I have changed in their eyes. Often it is awe or admiration, sometimes it is repulsion, once or twice it has been fury hurled directly at me for reasons I remain unsure of.

I stared at her black hair. It was shiny like the promises in magazines.

If I shut my eyes, I believed, I would disappear. To make it through, I had to be present the whole time.

The living deserve attention, too

I missed her then but it was an odd sort of missing because by then, I knew the meaning of forever.

Once released from life, having lost it in such violence, I couldn’t calculate my steps. I didn’t have time for contemplation. In violence it is the getting out that you concentrate on. When you begin to go over the edge, life receding from you as a boat recedes inevitably from the shore, you hold on to death tightly, like a rope that will transport you, and you swing out on it, hoping to land away from where you are.