Henry loves my hair almost as though it is a creature unto itself, as though it has a soul to call its own, as though it could love him back.

I sometimes end up in dangerous situations, and I come back to you broken and messed up, and you worry about me when I'm gone. It's like marrying a policeman.

I love. I have loved. I will love.

It’s dark now and I am very tired. I love you, always. Time is nothing.

There are several ways to react to being lost. One is to panic: this was usually Valentina's first impulse. Another is to abandon yourself to lostness, to allow the fact that you've misplaced yourself to change the way you experience the world.

Oh. A bigger studio. It dawns on me, stupid me, that Henry could win the lottery at any time at all; that he has never bothered to do so because it's not normal; that he has decided to set aside his fanatical dedication to living like a normal person so I can have a studio big enough to roller-skate across; that I am being an ingrate. "Clare? Earth to Clare..." "Thank you," I say, too abruptly.

The compelling thing about making art - or making anything, I suppose - is the moment when the vaporous, insubstantial idea becomes a solid there, a thing, a substance in a world of substances.