So are you going to be my knight in shining armor or what?' Kent does a little bow. 'You know I can't resist a damsel in distress.

This is the past: It drifts, it gathers. If you are not careful, it will bury you.

I start to follow her, and Alex grabs my hand. "I'll find you," he says, watching me with the eyes I remember. "I won't let you go again." I don't trust myself to speak. Instead I nod, hoping that he understands me. He squeezes my hand. "Go," he says.

It was all very strange, Mr. Gray thought, as he wiped the coffee canister clean with a sponge. Very, very mysterious. You were born; you lived a whole life; and at the end, you wound up in a coffee canister. "Ah, well," he said out loud quietly. "That's just the way things are. Life's a funny business." Death, he supposed, was the punch line.

The salt blowing off the sea makes the air feel textured and heavy.

Let me tell you something about dying: it's not as bad as they says. it's the coming-back-to-life part that hurts.

With the cure, relationships are all the same, and rules and expectations are defined. Without the cure, relationships must be reinvented every day, languages constantly decoded and deciphered. Freedom is exhausting.