“You were my home, Mother. I had no home but you”

“Do you ever want to go home?' I asked Paul.He brushed an ash from my face. 'It's the century of the displaced person,' he said. 'You can never go home.”

“We have no home, she told me. I am your home.”

“she’s not as pretty as you,” I said“But she’s a simpler girl,” my mother whispered.”

“at least if you were ignorant you could do wat you wanted. you had no idea wat had been acheived in the past. you were free instead of chewed at by bleeding impotence, dissolved away like a pearl in acid”

“I thought how tenuous the links were between mother and children between friends family things you think are eternal. Everything could be lost more easily than anyone could imagine.”

“Who was I, really? I was the sole occupant of my mother's totalitarian state, my own personal history rewritten to fit the story she was telling that day. There were so many missing pieces. I was starting to find some of them, working my way upriver, collecting a secret cache of broken memories in a shoebox.”