A skeptic, I would ask for consistency first of all.

I tried to speak in a cool, calm way, but the zombie rose up in my throat and choked me off.

There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice - patched, retreaded and approved for the road.

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: It is what you fear. I do not fear it: I have been there.

From the night Buddy Willard kissed me and said I must go out with a lot of boys, he made me feel I was much more sexy and experienced than he was and that everything he did like hugging and kissing and petting was simply what I made him feel like doing out of the blue, he couldn’t help it and didn’t know how it came about. Now I saw he had only been pretending all this time to be so innocent.

No, I won't try to escape myself by losing myself in artificial chatter 'Did you have a nice vacation?' 'Oh, yes, and you?' I'll stay here and try to pin that loneliness down.

Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.