I wonder whether she was sorry for leaving us behind.

willing me to understand: that people should be sacrificed to causes, that beauty can be built on the backs of the dead.

I need him to know that I came for him. I need him to know that somehow, at some point in the tunnels, I began to love him.

It is a ruined-world, a nonsense-place.

Like I've been sketched by an amateur artist: if you don't look too closely, it's all right, but start focusing and all the smudges and mistakes become really obvious.

I am growing stronger. I am a stone being excavated by the slow passage of water; I am wood charred by a fire.

But maybe happiness isn't in the choosing. Maybe it's in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.