Look. I have a strategy. Why expect anything? If you don’t expect anything, you don’t get disappointed.

You show you care, you die.You show you fear, you die.You show nothing, maybe you live.

Ama wipes her hands on her apron, looks up at our old roof with new eyes, and lifts the baby from his basket. She twirls him in the air, her skirts flying around her ankles the way the clouds swirl around the mountain cap--her laughter fresh and strange and musical to my ears.

Look. I have a strategy. Why expect anything? If you don’t expect anything, you don’t get disappointed.

Instead, we linger over a luxury that costs nothing: Imagining what may be.

If you look hard enough, chaos turns into order the way letters turn into words.

I imagine you working on me as an algebra problem, reducing me to fractions, crossing out common denominators, until there's nothing left on the page but a line that says x = whatever it is that is wrong with me.