Things change after you die, though, I guess because dying is the loneliest thing you can do.

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

I don't understand how everything changes, how the layers of your life get buried. Impossible. At some point, at some time, we must all explode.

Love: a single word, a wispy thing, a word no bigger or longer than an edge.

But for now, the future, like the past, means nothing. For now, there is only a homestead built of trash and scraps, at the edge of a broken city, just beyond a towering city dump; and our arrival-hungry, and half-frozen, to a place of food and water and walls that keep out the brutal winds. This, for us, is heaven.

And you should hear the music. Incredible, amazing music, like nothing you've ever heard, music that almost takes your head off, you know? That makes you want to scream and jump up and down and break stuff and cry.

And for a moment―for a split second―everything else falls away, the whole pattern and order of my life, and a huge joy crests in my chest. I am no one, and I owe nothing to anybody, and my life is my own.