There's always world enough and time.

I love. I have loved. I will love.

Clare, I want to tell you, again, I love you. Our love has been the thread through the labyrinth, the net under the high-wire walker, the only real thing in this strange life of mine that I could ever trust. Tonight I feel that my love for you has more density in this world than I do, myself: as though it could linger on after me and surround you, keep you, hold you.

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.

…she smiles in an exhausted but warm sort of way, as though she is a brilliant sun in some other galaxy

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

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