I thought I was being loved because I was being altered.

He was a man who wrote, who interpreted the world. Wisdom grew out of being handed just the smallest sliver of emotion. A glance could lead to paragraphs of theory.

This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.

It's an odd state to be in, blowing the whistle on your home country.

What he would say, he cannot say to this woman whose openness is like a wound, whose youth is not mortal yet. He cannot alter what he loves most in her, her lack of compromise, where the romance of the poems she loves still sits with ease in the real world. Outside these qualities he knows there is no order in the world.

So many nurses had turned into emotionally disturbed handmaidens of the war, in their yellow-and-crimson uniforms with bone buttons.

I'm a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I'm a member of both countries.