Is it the sea you hear in me? Its dissatisfactions? Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness? Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it.

It won't happen yet, Ellen mused, mashing cooked carrots for Jill's lunch. Breakups seldom do. It will unfold slowly, one little tell-tale symptom after another like some awful, hellish flower.

I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.

As I lay on my back in bed staring up at the blank, white ceiling the stillness seemed to grow bigger and bigger until I felt my eardrums would burst with it.

You smile. No, it is not fatal.

I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity. Clouds pass and disperse. Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? Is it for such I agitate my heart? I am incapable of more knowledge. What is this, this face So murderous in its strangle of branches? - Its snaky acids kiss. It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults That kill, that kill, that kill.

I suppose I'll always be over-vulnerable, slightly paranoid.