Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like Braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes, never unfold too much, or tell the whole story. I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book.

We are lucky, even the worst of us, for daylight comes.

I choose this story above all others because it's a story I'm struggling to end.

To me, these days will never end. I am always there, in that room with her, or if not I, the imprint of myself - my fossil-love

Life was a pre-death experience.

Nothing has an unlikely quality. It is heavy.

And if I say to you that I am glad of everything we have done together, and sorry that we will not be here together in forty years, laughing at a faded photo of you impersonating a lion, it having withered well, you less so, as we stand fabulously old, in a city that understands what spirit it takes to be old, to be beautiful, to be much looked at, to be itself, to be never quite caught, to have a past, to be content, to have seen much, to have remained, to have continued...