but isn't there always one good thing to look back on? think of how many cups of coffee we drank together.

Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality.

It began as a mistake.

Thanksgiving. It proved you had survived another year with its wars, inflation, unemployment, smog, presidents. It was a grand neurotic gathering of clans: loud drunks, grandmothers, sisters, aunts, screaming children, would-be suicides. And don't forget indigestion. I wasn't different from anyone else: There sat the 18-pound bird on my sink, dead, plucked, totally disemboweled. Iris would roast it for me.

I think that the world should be full of cats and full of rain, that's all, just cats and rain, rain and cats, very nice, good night.

I feel strangely normal.

My flesh looked like it wasn't trying. It looked like it hated being part of me.