The funeral was over, at last I could cry. Except that I couldn't. My tears, kept in too long, had fossilized. They would have to stay in forever now.

To anyone who took the trouble to look, I was plainly visible, but when people are expecting to see nothing, that is usually what they see.

Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born...Yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole. - Vida Winter

Still in my coat and hat, I sank onto the stair to read the letter. (I never read without making sure I am in a secure position. I have been like this ever since the age of seven when, sitting on a high wall and reading The Water Babies, I was so seduced by the descriptions of underwater life that I unconsciously relaxed my muscles. Instead of being held buoyant by the water that so vividly surrounded me in my mind, I plummeted to the ground and knocked myself out. I can still feel the scar under my fringe now. Reading can be dangerous.)

For it must be very lonely being dead.

What better place to kill time than a library?

In this cruel world kindness should always be repaid.