....love and desire enjoy a symbiotic relationship, meaning that one cannot exist without the other. Desire is an enemy to contentment; desire is illness, a feverish brain. Who can be considered healthy who wants? The very word want suggests a lack, an impoverishment, and that is what desire is: an impoverishment of the brain, a flaw, a mistake.

The Story of Solomon is the only way I know how to explain. And then, in smaller letters: Forgive me.

This is what we are made for: promises, pledges, and sworn oaths of obedience.

I’m sorry for everything.” Then he turns and pushes back into the woods, and he’s gone.

That's the way I feel, at least: like there's a real me and a reflection of me, and I have no way of telling which is which.

It was a bird. A bird struggling through stickiness: a bird coated in paint, floundering in its nest, splashing color everywhere. Red. Red. Red. Dozens of them: black feathers coated thickly with crimson-colored paint, fluttering among the branches. Red means run.

It's as though the words are trapped, buried under past fears, past lives, like fossils compressed under layers of dirt.