We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that her sisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too.

College wasn't like the real world. In the real world people dropped names based on their renown. In college, people dropped names based on their obscurity.

So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.

The Statue of Liberty's gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars.

It was something every child knew how to do, maintain a direct and full connection with the world. Somehow you forgot about it as you grew up, and had to learn it again.

I'm the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival.

What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself.