No, what I felt was the torment of waiting, stuck between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next which might or might not bring a hail storm, plane crash, poetic justice, or a miraculous reversal.

Sometimes, waking early before the others, wandering the rooms wrapped in a blanket or drinking my tea in the empty kitchen, I had that most rare of feelings, the sense that the world, so consistently overwhelming and incomprehensible, in fact has an order, oblique as it may seem, and I a place within it.

I've reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without.

Better to try and fail than not to try at all

I read like an animal. I read under the covers, I read lying in the grass, I read at the dinner table. While other people were talking to me, I read.

I'm not immune to the readers' desires. Sometimes they are my own, because I'm a reader, too. The readers' desire to know what really happened and what didn't. To have a glimpse into what's really the author and what isn't. I think we all have that and I wonder about what it means.

I forced myself to picture the last moments. The penultimate breath. A final sigh. And yet. It was always followed by another.