I open the door wide to reveal the answer. They all look at Sean standing there with his hands in his pocket and the other hand around loaf of bread and it occurs to me all in a rush as they stare at him that Sean looks a little, just a little, like he's courting. I don't have time to explain the truth of it before Tommy laughs and jumps to his feet. "Sean Kendrick, the devil. How are you?

Rilke says: Verweilung, auch am Verstrautesten nicht, ist uns gegeben - We are not allowed to linger, even with what is most intimate.

I can't tell the difference," I said. "Between not fighting and giving up.

I had so much free time that free time was meaningless.

I've been waiting for you forever." "Forever' as in several hundred years, or forever as in since my lesson began?

Everything mattered and nothing did, and I was tired of trying to find out how both of those things were true. I was an itch that I'd scratched so hard I was bleeding. I had set out to do the impossible, whatever the impossible might be, only to find out that it was living with myself. Suicide became an expiration date, the day after which I no longer had to try.

Mother and daughter like spoons in a drawer.