Never mind. Point being that you don't have to get too worked up about us, dear educated minds. You don't have to think of us aas real girls, real flesh and blood, real pain, real injustice. That might be too upsetting. Just discard the sordid part. Consider us pure symbol. We're no more real than money.

I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.

This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.

In my dreams of this city I am always lost.

A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they've learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?

For if the world treats you well, Sir, you come to believe you are deserving of it.

Perhaps its not the world that is soundless but we who are deaf.