Have you ever found your heart's desire and then lost it? I had seen myself, a portrait of myself as a reader. My childhood: days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew, forbidden books read secretively late at night. Teenage years reading -trying to read- books I'd heard were important, Naked Lunch, and The Fountainhead, Ulysses and Women in Love... It was as though I had dreamt the perfect lover, who vanished as I woke, leaving me pining and surly.

Sometimes a thing is—too much—and it has to be isolated and put away." Martin shrugged. "So what's in the boxes is—emotion. In the form of objects."-Her Fearful Symmetry

Outside it's a perfect spring night. We stand on the sidewalk in front of our apartment building, and Henry takes my hand, and I look at him, and I raise our joined hands and Henry twirls me around and soon we're dancing down Belle Plaine Avenue, no music but the sound of cars whoosing by and our own laughter, and the smell of cherry blossoms that fall like snow on the sidewalk as we dance underneath the tress.

He had never realized, while Elspeth was alive, the extent to which a thing had not completely happened until he told her about it.

I hate to be where she is not, when she is not. And yet, I am always going. - Henry deTamble

I'm sorry. I didn't know you were coming or I'd have cleaned up a little more. My life, I mean, not just the apartment.

When it's over you look up: the world looks the same but you are somehow different and that feeling lingers for days.