Everyone breathes in air, but it's a wise person who knows when to use that air to speak and when to exhale in silence.

Or is this how humans survive, shrugging off history, immersing themselves in the moment?

I walk out of the room, lurching under the weight of the lesson I've learned less than one hour into wifehood: How quickly the sweetest love turns rancid when it isn't returned. When the one you love loves someone else.

Words are tricky. Sometimes you need them to bring out the hurt festering inside. If you don't, it turns gangrenous and kills you. . . . But sometimes words can break a feeling into pieces.

Love comes like lightning, and disappears the same way. If you are lucky, it strikes you right. If not, you'll spend your life yearning for a man you can't have.

Each spice has a special day to it. For turmeric it is Sunday, when light drips fat and butter-colored into the bins to be soaked up glowing, when you pray to the nine planets for love and luck.

the darkness is a cresting wave. It sweeps me up out of my body until I float among the stars, those tine bright pores on the sky's skin. If only I could pass through them, I would end up on the other side, the right side, shadowless, perfectly illuminated, beyond the worries of this mundane world