Mom had just gotten back from Sydney, and she had brought me an immense, surpassingly blue butterfly, Papilio ulysses, mounted in a frame filled with cotton. I would hold it close to my face, so close I couldn't see anything but that blue. It would fill me with a feeling, a feeling I later tried to duplicate with alcohol and finally found again with Clare, a feeling of unity, oblivion, mindlessness in the best sense of the word.

He thanked her and left the house in the mood of a shipwrecked man who has allowed the rescue ship to pass him by.

He said something interesting: he said that he thinks there is only free will when you are in time, in the present. He says in the past we can only do what we did, and we can only be there if we were there.

that's what I love you for: your inability to perceive all my hideous flaws

Time passes and the pain begins to roll in and out as though it’s a woman standing at an ironing board, passing the iron back and forth, back and forth across a white tablecloth.

I think about my mother singing after lunch on a Summer afternoon, twirling in blue dress across the floor of her dressing room

I keep myself busy. Time goes faster that way.