Fear is... a kind of unintentional storytelling that we are all born knowing how to do.

Past, present, future – a physicist might say these distinctions are illusions anyway. The human brain is subject to all kinds of misperceptions, and the waking mind not always more attuned to reality than the dreaming one.

What went on in that head of his? I would soon come to understand that he gave voice to only a fraction of the thoughts that swam behind his eyes.

They died, he wrote, as if overcome by sleep – or, according to a second translation: as if drowned in a dream.

In general, I think I’m quick to worry about disasters of all kinds.

They sleep like children, mouths open, cheeks flushed. Breathing as rhythmic as swells on a sea. No longer allowed in the rooms, their mothers and fathers watch them through double-paned glass. Isolation – that’s what the doctors call it: the separation of the sick from the well. But isn’t every sleep a kind of isolation? When else are we so alone?

To close one’s eyes can be an act of survival.

Sara is still a little in her dream – something about her mother, the idea of her, anyway. She is wearing the green cardigan from the picture of her that Sara has in her drawer. And the kitchen. They were sitting together in the kitchen. But matching the words to the dream only dissolves what is left of it, the way certain stars vanish from the sky if you look directly at them.

There is a difference between what is not true and what cannot be measured.

His girl will love and be loved. She will suffer, and she will cause suffering. She will be known and unknown. She will be content and discontented. She will sometimes be lonely and sometimes less so. She will dream and be dreamed of. She will grieve and be grieved for. She will struggle and triumph and fail. There will be days of spectacular beauty, sublime and unearned. There will be moments of rapture. She will sometimes feel afraid.