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I don't believe in karma.

Time constricts and flattens, you know. It’s not evenly weighted. Certain moments linger in the mind and others disappear. The first twenty-three years of my life are the ones that shaped me, and the fact that I’ve lived almost seven decades since then is irrelevant.

If you going to steal a book thought, you should at least take the nicest one, otherwise what’s the point?

The house must be a sanctuary.

I am the only one of my siblings with red hair. When I asked my da where I got it, he joked that there must’ve been rust in the pipes. His own hair was dark – “cured,” he said, through years of toil – but when he was young it was more like auburn. Nothing like yours, he said. Your hair is as vivid as a Kinvara sunset, autumn leaves, the Koi goldfish in the window of that hotel in Galway. Mr. Grote doesn’t.

Now and then I leaf through the small blue volume of Emily Dickinson poems that my teacher, Mrs. Crowley, pressed into my hand. I remember her words to me when I left school: Your mind will be your comfort. It is, sometimes. And sometimes it isn’t.

I am learning to pretend, to smile and nod, to display.

Las cosas que importan se quedan contigo, se filtran en tu piel.

Something in his manner makes me want to confide things to him I’ve never told anyone. Even painful things, shameful things. I didn’t know how badly I wanted to share them.