I don't want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can't even see it, something that's drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead.

I meet a lot of readers who first encountered my work in school. And I can only assume there is another group who would run away very fast if they saw me coming, for exactly the same reason. Reading is individual, and not all tastes are alike.

A hot wind was blowing around my head, the strands of my hair lifting and swirling in it, like ink spilled in water.

Like the trains, she's never on time and always departing.

I walk away from him. It's enormously pleasing to me, this walking away. It's like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will.

I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.

I sometimes felt as if these marks on my body were a kind of code, which blossomed, then faded, like invisible ink held to a candle. But if they were a code, who held the key to it? I was sand, I was snow — written on, rewritten, smoothed over.