“Because it was starting to get dark, and because the streets were crowded, I bumped into a googolplex people. Who were they? Where were they going? What were they looking for? I wanted to hear their heartbeats, and I wanted them to hear mine.”

“I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for.”

“I’ was the last word I was able to speak aloud. I wanted to pull the thread, unravel the scarf of my silence and start again from the beginning, but instead I said, ‘I.’ I know I’m not alone in this disease, you hear the old people in the street and some of them are moaning, “Ay yay yay,” but some of them are clinging to their last word, ‘I,’ they’re saying, because they’re desperate, it’s not a complaint it’s a prayer, and then I lost ‘I’ and my silence was complete.”

“What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone's heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don't really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn't have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war.”

“There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me.”

“I zipped myself all the way into the sleeping bag of myself, not because I was hurt, and not because I had broken something, but because they were cracking up.”

“I know you look both ways before you cross the street, but I want you to look both ways a second time, because I told you to.”