Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough.

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

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.

In the end we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn't name.

She understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, anything else.

She wanted a book to take her places she couldn't get to herself.

We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the version of the world they really believed in.