But will you miss me? More importantly - will I miss you? Does either one of us really want to hear the answer to that question?

What could you give me," I ask, my voice shaking, "to make me forget ... that you forgot about me?

I imagined what it would be like to hold a butterfly in your hands something bejeweled and treasured and to know that despite your devotion it was dying by degrees.

I would figure out, later, how to explain to my boss that, for me, Delia will never be a story, but a happy ending.

Sometimes I think there's a beast that lives inside me, in the cavern that's where my heart should be, and every now and then it fills every last inch of my skin, so that I can't help but do something inappropriate. Its breath is full of lies; it smells of spite.

There are certain things that I'll hear about and that I think will make a great book and I put it in a file. Sometimes it's a situation that interests me, and I don't even realize what I'm trying to say about it until I get closer to it. Sometimes the book after that I've written 125 pages of, and I can tell you what the book is after that. I just sort of have a linear progression, but more than anything, the topics land in your lap. I don't feel that I go out searching for them.

That's the paradox of loss: How can something that's gone weigh us down so much?