Tell me about yourself." "Myself?" He looks confused. "Yes," I say, patting the mattress. "You know all there is to know," he says, sitting beside me. "Not true," I say. "Where were you born? What's your favourite season? Anything." "Here. Florida," he says. "I remember a woman in a red dress with curly brown hair. Maybe she was my mother, I'm not sure. And summer. What about you?" The last part is said with a smile. He smiles so infrequently that I consider each one a trophy.

What have you done? What have you given up?' So many things, Cecily. More than you know.

Everyone should remember being born. It doesn't seem fair that we only remember dying.

He sits next to me, careful to avoid my hair that's splayed out around my head like blood. A bullet to the forehead, boom, blond waves everywhere.

The sullen boy sitting before me is not my husband, and the girl he is fretting over isn't me, will never be me.

I see an ocean that’s spilled out of a wineglass, its body clear and sparkling and folding over itself. I see a ribbon of sand.

I used to have only one name; it used to mean something.