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

Trying to remember, I have learned, is like trying to clutch a handful of fog. Trying to forget, like trying to hold back the monsoon.

Simply to endure is to triumph.

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.

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

Long time I been on my own, but now really I'm alone. I survive the killing, the starving, all the hate of the Khmer Rouge, but I think maybe now I will die of this, of broken heart.

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