I wanted him to envy me, perhaps because I needed another’s gaze to help me look more kindly on my life…
. . .
Because I didn't want to forget was the heart and soul of poetry.
. . .
She'd been ringing all morning. Rather than suppose I never wanted to see her, or had spent the night with someone else, she'd assumed the worst and checked with the hospital. With amazing confidence in herself, in people, in the power of truth and candor. In her place, the first thing I would have imagined was that I had disappeared - or, better yet, absconded with her father's twenty-dollar bill. If only all humans were like her and thought her way, there wouldn't be an oblique ripple left on earth.
. . .
I knew that, with the exception of those in the room who'd had to recobble their lives and reinvent themselves to live in the States, very few would understand that no human being is one thing only, that each of one of us has as many facets as there are people we know.
