“Stories are a kind of thing, too. Stories and objects share something, a patina. I thought I had this clear, two years ago before I started, but I am no longer sure how this works. Perhaps a patina is a process of rubbing back so that the essential is revealed, the way that a striated stone tumbled in a river feels irreducible, the way that this netsuke of a fox has become little more than a memory of a nose and a tail. But it also seems additive, in the way that a piece of oak furniture gains over years and years of polishing, and the way the leaves of my medlar shine.”

“Maybe it takes five years for wishes to come true, I thought. The same way the best time to start something was five years ago”

“I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water. ”

“But I had become a different person. One who looked at things in a new way. I appreciated life a whole lot more than I had last year.”

“‎"Living inside an over-sized body, I felt safer than I had in years. But something was missing. My heartbeat, I could no longer feel it beneath the walls of fat and pain." Small Pleasures: Mya's Story”

“I thought about how the past can become so small. An entire day, 24 separate, heavy hours, becomes the size of a tiny brown leaf falling from a tree. Before you know it, a whole year is just a pile of dead leaves on the ground. The year or so I’d spent in love with Chad was starting to feel so long ago, swept away by the wind. I knew that this year would soon feel far away too.”