There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.

A bridge is a meeting place . . . a possibility, a metaphor.

I think we are worlds compressed into human form.

The truth is I am inventing the maybe. I can only make the choices I make, so why torture myself with what I might have done, when all I can handle is what I have done? The Maybe Islands are hostile to human life.

You cannot disown what is yours. Flung out, there is always the return, the reckoning, the revenge, perhaps the reconciliation. There is always the return.

And you? Now that I have discovered you? Beautiful, dangerous, unleashed. Still I try to hold you, knowing that your body is faced with knives.

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.