I'd never chosen to be alone, but that was the way things had turned out, and I'd grown used to it.

Something had been buried that was not yet dead.

Knowing one was comprised of recycled matter only and that selfhood was a delusion did not take away the aching of the heart.

Oh, the sweetness of giving in, of full surrender.

This intimacy is not necessary; no one is compelling me to open my inmost self and lay it naked, undefended, against that of another – merely for the joy of the communion.

Shakespeare drew a map of the human mind as clearly as Newton mapped the heavens. Wht is one considered science and the other fir only to be mocked with jokes about pretty girls and drury lane?

I breathed and breathed and did feel some calmness enter in, though it was, as always, shot with a sense of loss. Loss and fear.