It's the solitude that slays you. Maybe because you'd expected ruin to arrive in a grander and more romantic form.

Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.

Man," he said, "I'm not afraid of graveyards. The dead are just, you know, people who wanted the same things you and I want.""What do we want?" I asked blurrily."Aw, man, you know," he said. "We just want, well, the same things these people wanted.""What was that?"He shrugged. "To live, I guess," he said.

I was living my own future and my brother's lost one as well. I represented him here just as he represented me there, in some unguessable other place. His move from life to death might resemble my stepping into the kitchen - into its soft nowhere quality and foggy hum. I breathed the dark air. If I had at that moment a sense of calm kindly death while my heart beat and my lungs expanded, he might know a similar sense of life in the middle of his ongoing death.

Were you relieved, maybe just a little, when they lifted you up (you weighed almost nothing by then) and shoved you into the oven? Did it seem unanticipated but right, somehow - did it strike you as satisfying, as a fate finally realized - when they slammed the door behind you?

He needs a looser association. He needs something that implies a man who wants the ice shard to remain in his chest, who's learned to love the sensation of being pierced.

I've felt it for some time now, closing around me like the jaws of a gigantic flower. Isn't that a peculiar analogy? It feels that way, though. It has a certain vegetable inevitability. Think of the Venus flytrap. Think of kudzu choking a forest. It's a sort of juicy, green, thriving process. Toward, well, you know. The green silence. Isn't it funny that, even now, it's difficult to say the word 'death'?

Pensa a quanto più spazio occupi un essere in vita che in morte, a quanta dimensione illusoria sia contenuta nei gesti, nel movimento, nel respiro. Morti, ci riveliamo nelle nostre vere dimensioni, e sono dimensioni sorprendentemente modeste. (...) Non ha sentito forse lei stessa, Virginia, uno spazio vuoto dentro di sé, sorprendentemente piccolo, dove sembrava avessero dimora i sentimenti più forti?

We thought she was alright, we thought her sorrows were ordinary ones, We had no idea.