No one ever has or ever will travel quite the same path on earth.

That's how life goes on - protected by the silence that anesthetizes shame.

No one ever has or ever will travel quite the same path on earth.

Years bleach away the sense of things until all that's left is a bone-white past, stripped of feeling and significance.

When he wakes sometimes from dark dreams of broken cradles, and compasses without bearings, he pushes the unease down, lets the daylight contradict it. And isolation lulls him with the music of the lie.

Humans withdraw to their homes, and surrender the night to the creatures that own it: the crickets, the owls, the snakes. A world that hasn't changed for hundreds of thousands of years wakes up, and carries on as if the daylight and the humans and the changes to the landscape have all been an illusion.

Oh, but my treasure, it is so much less exhausting. You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things.