Droplets, droplets: we are all identical drips and drops of people, hovering, waiting to be tipped, waiting for someone to show us the way, to pour us down a path.

We should be protected from the people who will leave us in the end, from all the people who will disappear or forget us.

Juliet!' I whip around but not quickly enough. She's swallowed by the crowd, the gap that allowed her to break for the door closing just as quickly as it opened, a shifting Tetris pattern of bodies.

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

Grief is like sinking, like being buried.

I will make a pact with you: I will do it if you will do it, always and forever. Take down the walls.

If he were less well trained, and less careful, he would say hate. But he can’t say it; it is too close to passion, and passion is too close to love, and love is amor deliria nervosa, the deadliest of all deadly things: It is the reason for the games of pretend, for the secret selves, for the spasms in the throat.