“Did the continents, I wondered, feel lonely for each other as they drifted apart eons ago?”

“I wonder sometimes what the memory of God looks like. Is it a palace of infinite rooms, a chest of many jeweled objects, a long, lonely landscape where each tree recalls an eon, each pebble the life of a man? Where do I live, in the memory of God?”

“The hungry feeling and the lonely feeling merged until it was hard to tell them apart.”

“I did not feel that he owed it to me. And I did not feel like I owed it to him. We owed it to each other, which is something different.”

“I could feel the tears beginning to collect in my throat again, but I pushed them apart, away from each other. Tears are only a threat in groups.”

“And we could all sit around and wonder and feel bad about each other and blame a lot of people for what they did or didn’t do or what they didn’t know. I don’t know. I guess there would always be someone to blame.”