A room full of words that are nearly the truth but not quite, each note fluttering off the steam of its rose like a broken butterfly wing.

...the past: It drifts, it gathers. If you are not careful, it will bury you. This is half the reason for the cure: It clean-sweeps; it makes the past, and all its pain, distant, like the barest impression on sparkling glass.

Direction, like time, is a general thing, the deprived of boundaries and borders. It is an endless process interception and reinterception, doubling back and adjusting.

But it does not tell you this: that love will turn the whole world into something greater than itself.

What does it feel like to be infected?" "I-- I can't describe it." I force the words out. Can't breathe, can't breathe, can't breathe. His skin smells like smoke from a wood fire, like soap, like heaven. I imagine tasting his skin; I imagine biting his lips. "I want to know." His words are a whisper, barely audible. "I want to know with you.

Two weeks until your cure" she says finally. "Sixteen days" I say, but in my head I'm counting: Seven days. Seven days until I'm free and away from all these people and their sliding superficial lives brushing past one another gliding, gliding, gliding from life to death. For them there's hardly a change between the two.

I need to live my life in the light of their deaths. I need to live.