Do you like me?” No answer. Silence bounced, fell off his tongue and sat between us and clogged my throat. It slaughtered my trust. It tore cigarettes out of my mouth. We exchanged blind words, and I did not cry, I did not beg, but blackness filled my ears, blackness lunged in my heart, and something that had been good, a sort of kindly oxygen, turned into a gas oven.

As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love.

To be without God is to be a snake / who wants to swallow an elephant.

Let there be a heaven so that man may outlive his grasses.

You who have inhabited me in the deepest and most broken place, are going, going

...became a woman who learned her own skin and dug into her soul and found it full.

I lay there silently, hoarding my small dignity. I did not ask about the gate or the closet. I did not question the bedtime ritual where, on the cold bathroom tiles, I was spread out daily and examined for flaws. I did not know that my bones, those solids, those pieces of sculpture would not splinter.