When they kissed she immediately felt his tongue, tensed and strong, pushing past her teeth, like some bully shouldering his way into a room. Entering her.

This is how the entire course of a life can be changed - by doing nothing.

...beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.

i'm going mad, i told myself. let me not be mad.

The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.

She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty which a lifetime havit had taught her to ignore.

We knew so little about eachother. We lay mostly submerged, like ice floes with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white. Here was a rare sight below the waves, of a man's privacy and turmoil, of his dignity upended by the overpowering necessity of pure fantasy, pure thought, by the irreducible human element - Mind.