“It took me as long as I had known him to get rid of all of his words. Like turning an hourglass over.”

“We tried so hard. We were always trying to help each other. But not because we were helpless. He needed to get things for me, just as I needed to get things for him. It gave us purpose. Sometimes I would ask him for something that I did not even want, just to let him get it for me. We spent our days trying to help each other help each other. I would get his slippers. He would make my tea. I would turn up the heat so he could turn up the air conditioner so I could turn up the heat.”

“It stayed with him, like a part of him, like a birthmark, like a limb, it was on him, in him, him, his hymn: I had to do it for myself.”

“Or perhaps a widow found him and took him in: brought him an easy chair, changed his sweater every morning, shaved his face until the hair stopped growing, took him faithfully to bed with her every night, whispered sweet nothings into what was left of his ear, laughed with him over black coffee, cried with him over yellowing pictures, talked greenly about having kids of her own, began to miss him before she became sick, left him everything in her will, thought of only him as she died, always knew he was fiction but believed in him anyway.”

“I realized that your mother couldn't see the emptiness, she couldn't see anything...All of the words I'd written to her over all of those years, had I never said anything to hear at all?”

“I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: "Do you like me?”

“My boots were so heavy that I was glad there was a column beneath us. How could such a lonely person have been living so close to me my whole life? If I had known, I would have gone up to keep him company.”