“But recalling how my ex had nasty BO after track practice never made me feel better. It seemed disingenuous to hold things against him that before I readily accepted as the price of love.”

“But what I did was the kind of thing you'd do and the kind of thing you've done: I felt bad for him and for myself and I went on with my week and then my summer and I started telling my story to whoever would listen. And my story was this: I survived camp. I survived my brother. I survived my own bad feelings. Love me for being so sad about it. Love me for knowing what I did. Love me for being in the lifeboat after everyone else went under. And my story made me feel better and it made me feel worse. And it worked.”

“He tried to tell me week after week to accept things as they were and move on with my life. But if there was one man who had put his life on hold to wait for something or someone, it was him.”

“These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.”

“He was actually interested in things I had to say, something I'd never experienced before and made me feel extraordinarily special.”

“Nick as in my former boyfriend Nick. Ex-rat, ex-boyfriend, ex-alive if I ever got hold of him Nick.”