Axiom: you are a sea. Your eye- lids curve over chaos My hands where they touch you, create small inhabited islands soon you will be all earth: a known land, a country.

I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilized. I wish it showed me in a better light, if not happier, than at least more active, less hesitant, less distracted by trivia. I wish it had more shape. I wish t were about love, or about sudden realizations important to one’s life, or even about sunsets, birds, rainstorms, or snow. I’m sorry there is so much pain in this story. I’m sorry it’s in fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by force. But there is nothing I can do to change it.

When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.

Don't let the bastards grind you down.

A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.

I am afraid of falling into hopeless despair, over my wasted life, and I am still not sure how it happened.

Richard liked to say he picked things up for a song, which was odd, because he never sang. He never even whistled. He was not a musical person.