By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.

But in a story I can steal her soul.

Everything was such a damned nice idea when it was an idea.

I live in my head all day long and the world is a little dreamy.

They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.

Once someone's dead you can't make them undead.

I guess we're really brothers, aren't we? Don't know what that means, except it means that some of the same things we remember.