Perhaps that’s what life is about – the search for such a connection. The search for magic. The search for the inexplicable. Not in order to explain it, or contain it. Simply in order to feel it. Because in that recognition of the sublime, we see for a moment the entire universe in the palm of our hand. And in that moment, we touch the face of God.

We had come so close to greatness. We had smelled it, and it smelled like roast pig. Everybody likes the smell of roast pig. But what is worse, smelling the roast and not feasting, or not smelling the roast at all?

But I wondered why they had waited for Eve’s illness to make themselves available for companionship.

Intention is everything.

After this happens, Denny will be free to live his life, and I will return to earth in a new form, as a man, and I will find him and shake his hand and comment on how talented he is, and then I will wink at him and say, “Enzo says hello,” and turn and walk quickly away as he calls after me, “Do I know you?” He will call, “Have we met before?

So he didn’t fall hopelessly into the bottle, the refuge of the weak and the maudlin.

The rain has been incessant. It feeds my soul. I feel that it washes over my body, and a part of me drips into the soil with the rain, and a part of me becomes the soil and is drank into the roots of these trees and I have become one with them.

With a book – presuming it’s a good book – you can depend upon an outcome that adheres to the necessities of drama.

I could have grabbed his shirt collar. I could have pulled him close to me, so close he could feel my breath on his skin, and I could have said to him, “This is just a crisis. A flash! A single match struck against the implacable darkness of time! You are the one who taught me to never give up. You taught me that new possibilities emerge for those who are prepared, for those who are ready. You have to believe!

Eve continued with the inexorable process of dying, Zoe spent too much time with her grandparents, and Denny and I worked at slowing the beating of our hearts so we wouldn’t feel so much pain.