However long the moon disappears, someday it must shine again.

When I reached Fort Binjemma, for example, where my grandfather was stationed for a while, the whole Victorian fort was decaying. Barbed wire surrounded it, spray paint on the ancient walls claimed it as private property, and the moat where my grandfather and his men had grown crops - in desperation as the siege's hunger bit - was completely overgrown with bushes and trees.

This thing with being lovers, it isn't like being married.

Still shaking, in the pew, I understood that it isn't the dead we cry for. We cry for ourselves, and I didn't deserve my own pity.

I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.

Wouldn't that be funny, if the oil rebels were playing U2 in their jungle camps, and the government soldiers were playing U2 in their trucks. I think everyone was killing everyone else and listening to the same music... That is a good trick about this world, Sarah. No one likes each other, but everyone likes U2.

That is how we lived, happily and without hope. I was very young then, and I did not miss having a future because I did not know I was entitled to one.