“What I saw was a beauty so tremendous, it had every bone in my exoskeleton shaking.”

“In the bath, in the sea, I imagined my body independent of another, only mine from the beginning until the end. I imagined floating along forever with my own weight and nothing more.”

“Now, everything refused to bloom, afraid of the pungent smoke and fires. The trees’ leaves departed with the wind, leaving them naked and silent.”

“How very sad, Martha thinks, around the sound of her embarrassment, which bleats louder than the braised lamb shank currently resting next to her husband’s potatoes probably did, in the minutes right before it became a shank, later braised, while it was still just a lamb.”

“The apartment itself contained all the colors of the off-white rainbow: egg shell, dusty beige, and dirty vanilla.”

“I drove right up the edge of a cliff that Noah used to do jumps off of in the summers when he was a teenager. He’s still a teenager, I guess. He’d never not be a teenager, at least. He’d be sixteen forever now.”

“The girl devoured salt like rice, by the cluster, and it was even sweeter when her mother wasn’t looking.”

“Whether the tears could be attributed to her extraordinary grasp on the subject matter at hand, the abject failings of American economics, her intimidation tactics, or her hotness, no one could really say.”

“They didn’t tell us that we were walking around with mirrors, each patient skewed to reflect a part of ourselves we couldn’t ignore.”

“We had so much silence to give. Each of us had ceased to investigate the other’s life long ago. For some time inquisitiveness grew easily in the fertile ground of my suspicion; I trusted her less, and this made me the more curious one.”

“That was enough, in my mind, to explain why I felt like a feather being lifted by some sort of artificial breeze every time I exited my life to enter Vic’s. Like a door slamming and me floating across the Bay Bridge in one instant. A kid’s adventure.”

“He looked directly at me for the first time, and I saw those same flecks of hazel in his irises that had once made me think of sunlight peeking through the redwood trees nearby my childhood home. Now, they were just colors that were a part of his eyes.”

“They had assembled in a protective blanket, their wings beating in waves that caused their dwelling to pulsate in shimmering patterns. The very stone seemed to breathe with each sonic ripple, heaving angrily at the intruder in its midst.”

“There was still dancing and singing and sledding and eating and laughing, of course, but not officially. Officially, everything was muted.”

“I had the fleeting thought that as some people live on books or good spirits, I could live on the happy crinkles of your eyes.” 

“And, by the way, this happened yesterday, but yesterday was August 2, 2022, and the vaccine proved very successful and people no longer have to socially distance, unfortunately, which is why he was within six feet of me.”

“Falling back into this place is more comfortable than ever and you spend a few months wondering what the difference is, if the best really has been saved for last.”

“And all the efforts you had put toward ideology turn away from the abstract and toward the immediate. It is in this moment that you begin to focus on survival—or as Lucy called it, love.”