No," I said. And maybe it was only because Alaska couldn't hit the brakes and I couldn't hit the accelerator.

And then the line was quite but not dead. I almost felt like he was there in my room with me, but in a way it was better, like I was not in my room and he was not in his, but instead we were together in some invisible and tenuous third space that could only be visited on the phone.

Our children are weird. Nicely phrased.

A paper town for a paper girl.

I was thinking about the universe wanting to be noticed, and how I had to notice it as best I could. I felt that I owed a debt to the universe that only my attention could repay, and also that I owed a debt to everybody who didn’t get to be a person anymore and everyone who hadn’t gotten to be a person yet.

The idea is that for ten minutes, we forget that we have feelings. And we forget about protecting ourselves or other people and we just say the truth. For ten minutes. And then we can go back to being lame.

It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.