“there were so many different ways to die, and I just need to know which was his.”

“I said, 'I need to know how he died.'He flipped back and pointed at, 'Why?'So I can stop inventing how he died. I'm always inventing.”

“I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it's in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.”

“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.”

“When the pages are in the typewriter, I can't see his face.In that way i am choosing you over him.I don't need to see him.I don't need to know if he is looking up at me.It's not even that I trust him not to leave.I know this won't last.I'd rather be me than him.The words are coming so easily.The pages are coming easily.At the end of my dream, Eve put the apple back on the branch. The tree went back into the ground. It became a sapling, which became a seed.God brought together the land and the water, the sky and the water, the water and the water, evening and morning, something and nothing.He said, Let there be light.And there was darkness.”

“... His arm was so thick and strong. I was sure it would protect me for as long as I lived. And it did. Even after I lost him. The memory of his arm wraps around me as his arm used to. Each day has been chained to the previous one. But the weeks have had wings. Why are you leaving me?He wrote, I do not know how to live. I do not know either, but I am trying.I do not know how to try. 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 put my hand on him. Touching him was always so important to me. It was something I lived for. My fingers against his shoulder. The outsides of our thighs touching as we squeezed together on the bus. I couldn't explain it, but I needed it. Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love. Why does anyone ever make love? ...”

“A map such as that one is worth many hundreds, and as luck will have it, thousands of dollars. But more than this, it is a remembrance of that time before our planet was so small. When this map was made, I thought, you could live without knowing where you were not living.”