The moon, too, abases her subjects, but in the daytime she is ridiculous. Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand, arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity, white and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide. No day is safe from news of you, walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.

If you pluck out my heart To find what makes it move, You’ll halt the clock That syncopates our love.

I smile, now, thinking: we all like to think we are important enough to need psychiatrists

You smile. No, it is not fatal.

I like people too much or not at all.

A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin.

She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist.