Then it was June and I started to feel like a new woman – not in a new-lease-on-life kind of way, more like a refinanced mortgage.

Love is a compromise for only getting to be one person.

After some time my husband reached over to hold my hand, which reminded me that at least there was this, at least we still had hands that remembered how to love each other, two bone-and-flesh flaps that hadn’t complicated their simple love by speaking or thinking or being disappointed or having memories. They just held and were held and that is all. Oh, to be a hand.

Why were we never together anymore, just alone in each other’s vicinity?

I was still new to this kind of adrenaline, the immediate release of anger instead of gnawing on it like overdue gum.

I found, increasingly, that I did not particularly care and I tried to fake a little kindness, a little sweetness, tried to mirror Luna back at herself, but that exhausted me after a week and I concluded that I was not meant for this sort of thing, friends, friendliness, no, I wasn’t meant for it.

I’m not a person who needs people, but I am the kind of person who needs to be near people who don’t need me.

While the monk was brushing my hair, my eyeballs were swelling wet, and even though he was behind me he somehow sensed that swell and said that tears are an expression of attachment and attachment to an isolated being leads to suffering.

I knew that everyone who was alive had trouble concentrating on life.

There’s nothing better about living in a farm than living in a city. You can’t just go sit in a pretty landscape and bet on it changing you into a better person.