Who was I, really? I was the sole occupant of my mother's totalitarian state, my own personal history rewritten to fit the story she was telling that day. There were so many missing pieces. I was starting to find some of them, working my way upriver, collecting a secret cache of broken memories in a shoebox.

I felt beautiful but also interrupted. I wasn't used to being so complicated.

She would buy magic every day of the week. Love me, that face said. I'm so lonely, so desperate. I'll give you whatever you want.

she was such a bad actress. she never said her lines rite, it was something perverse in her nature. and wat was her line anyway?

It was her first book, an indigo cover with a silver moonflower, an art nouveau flower, I traced my finger along the silver line like smoke, whiplash curves. ... I touched the pages her hands touched, I pressed them to my lips, the soft thick old paper, yellow now, fragile as skin. I stuck my nose between the bindings and smelled all the readings she had given, the smell of unfiltered cigarettes and the espresso machine, beaches and incense and whispered words in the night. I could hear her voice rising from the pages. The cover curled outward like sails.

Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow.

this was the wonderful thing about strangers. they were big blank pieces of paper, you could draw watever you like on their impresionable surfaces