His voice was handsome and broken, like a cobblestone street.

Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose, keep in touch (or don't), care about birthdays, waste and lose time, brush their teeth, feel nostalgia, scrub stains, have religions and political parties and laws, wear keepsakes, apologize years after an offense, whisper, fear themselves, interpret dreams, hide their genitalia, shave, bury time capsules, and can choose not to eat something for reasons of conscience. The justifications for eating animals and for not eating them are often identical: we are not them.

Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love? Why does anyone ever make love?

I flipped back through the pad of paper while I thought about what Stephen Hawking would do next.

I believed him. I was not stupid. I was his wife.

I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it?

Our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure.